


just like the movies

by playingprince



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - High School, Fluff, Light Angst, M/M, Summer Vacation, a little bit of heartbreak, mentions of anxiety/panic attacks, more kisses than strictly necessary, nerdy renjun, side established nahyuck!!!!!, soft jeno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-04-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:35:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 50,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23623981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/playingprince/pseuds/playingprince
Summary: Renjun is obsessed with small, beautiful details. It's lucky, then, that the boy next-door is made of them.
Relationships: Huang Ren Jun/Lee Jeno
Comments: 106
Kudos: 395
Collections: noren fic fest round 1





	1. summer

**Author's Note:**

> **prompt #075:** teenagers jeno and renjun have a summer fling when renjun stays with his uncle/cousin during a summer in korea. naturally they don't meet each other again after that summer bc renjun is in china. renjun thinks fondly of the summer fling every once in a while. years pass and renjun decides to study college in korea, and there he meets jeno again who definitely doesn't remember him.
> 
>  **Warnings:** non-explicit references to sex, mentions of anxiety/panic attacks, mentions of (minor character) death

Renjun held the viewfinder to his eye.

From up in the branches of the broad oak tree, he was able to trace the line of the horizon. He liked Seoul, because it was so different from Jilin, and he’d rarely had any opportunity to leave Jilin growing up. The furthest away he’d been before was Shenyang, when he and his parents had gone there on a family vacation, but he’d only been eight at the time, so he could hardly remember it now, and certainly didn’t have any of it recorded on video. Only fuzzy photos his mom had taken on her flip phone, and those were not good enough. It didn’t mean anything to Renjun unless he had it in motion, in perfect detail.

His uncle’s house was actually situated just outside the city to the northwest. It was better that way, Renjun thought, because it meant he would not be staying in one of those cramped little city houses where there would be no room between him and his neighbors. His uncle had a yard, and a very pretty yard at that, one full of trees and shade and a little garden that grew vegetables. He’d plucked a few snap peas and shoved them into his pocket, and ate them while he sat on his branch. And though he was not in Seoul, he was close enough that he thought he could see it, ghosts of skyscrapers that faded at their tops so he couldn’t tell where they ended and the clouds began.

The sun was sinking on his first day in Korea. He held his camcorder steady. He wanted to keep that image forever.

“What are you doing?”

Renjun looked down, through the dense green leaves. At the edge of his uncle’s yard was a gate, and standing behind that gate was a boy.

“Who are you?” Renjun asked. He spoke loudly to make his voice carry all the way down, though he found he hadn’t really needed to; the air was calm, easy to fill.

“Lee Jeno,” the boy said. “I live next door. Who are you?”

“Huang Renjun.”

“I’ve never seen you before.”

“I’m visiting my uncle for the summer.”

“You’re Mr. Huang’s nephew?” Jeno leaned against the gate, fingers curled around the black bars, making its hinges squeak. “Are you from China?”

“Yes.” Renjun’s uncle was a professor of Chinese language and literature at a university in Seoul. He’d lived in Korea for as long as Renjun had been alive, though he came back to Jilin once a year to visit the rest of the family. “My mom wanted me to come here so I can practice my Korean.”

“That’s neat,” Jeno responded. “Why are you in that tree?”

“I’m taking a video.”

“What for?”

“Because I like to. I want to be a director someday.” He’d wanted it for practically as long as he could remember. He loved the movies. When he was little, he would beg his mother to take him nearly every weekend, and if she said yes, he would skip all the way down to the moviehouse, and then inside the theater, claim the exact middle seat for the best possible movie-going experience. Once he got older, old enough to go by himself, he would save his allowance specifically for that purpose. He didn’t mind going alone like some people did, but he would drag his friends along, too, if he could. It was always more fun when there was someone to talk the ear off of once the showing was over.

“You mean you want to make movies?” Jeno asked.

“Yes.”

Jeno whistled, impressed. “Have you ever made a movie before?”

“Not really.” Renjun said, frowning. He had, technically, thought they weren’t anything to be proud of. They were short, choppily edited on the family computer, with his not-quite-actor-material friends cast in the main roles. He’d also shot them all on his doinky camcorder, a cheap model his parents had bought him for his twelfth birthday after he’d begged for a camera. He’d never told them before that he wanted to be a director, at least not explicitly, though he was sure they’d figured it out themselves. He knew they didn’t approve of it. They wanted him to be something practical, like a doctor or a lawyer or a businessman. He could not think of something more likely to put him to sleep than having to comb through a medical textbook or sit through a political science lecture.

“Well,” Jeno said. “If you’re getting bored up there, you can come over to my house. We’re having a barbecue. Invite your uncle, too.” He pushed off from the gate, making it rattle again on its hinges, and walked back to his yard.

Renjun lowered his camcorder. In the distance, he could see the flicker of yellow fire and wispy smoke rising above it. He could not smell it from so far, but he could imagine the tantalizing aroma of beef as it hit the grill. Carefully, he scrambled down the side of the tree, finding the correct footholds he’d used on the way up, and ran up to his uncle’s back doorstep.

“Uncle,” he called, cracking the door. “The neighbors invited us over for a barbecue.”

His uncle sat beyond the kitchen, through the archway into the living room. He was sitting in his plush purple chair beside his desk lamp, frameless glasses perched near the tip of his nose as he read his students’ papers. His hair was almost fully gray -- he was fifteen years older than Renjun’s father, though the image he projected was even more mature than that, like a man who’d had time to read every book in the world. Renjun liked that about him. It made him feel as if he would learn a lot that summer.

“Excellent,” his uncle responded, setting the papers on his crowded end table and folding his glasses on top. “I believe they have a son your age. Maybe the two of you will get along.”

“I already met him,” Renjun said. “He was the one who invited us.”

“Any possibility of friendship?” His uncle shuffled to the door, bones achy from being curled in his chair, and slipped on his sandals.

“Maybe.” Renjun wasn’t shy exactly, just concerned about making friends with a boy from another country. He was nervous about making mistakes while speaking Korean or committing some great cultural faux pas.

“He’s a good boy.” His uncle stepped out into the yard, and led the way towards the gate. “He helps me take care of my garbage and rakes the lawn for me in the autumn. He weeds the garden sometimes, too, and I let him take back some vegetables.” His uncle smiled, and his eyes crinkled at the corners. “Though that’ll be your job this summer. And I won’t even have to give you anything for it, since you’re family.”

Renjun snorted, but didn’t argue.

Now he _could_ smell the meat sizzling, and his mouth began to water. A man, Jeno’s father, came over to greet Renjun’s uncle and gestured towards the picnic table, where there was already some food laid out. “And you’re his nephew, right?” he asked Renjun, herding him along to take a seat.

“Yes.” Renjun settled at the table’s end and peered around the Lee family’s yard. It was smaller than his uncle’s, but full of vibrancy. Two bikes were leaned against the house’s wall, well-worn but rugged, bearing baskets at their handles. Tumbling pink roses framed a window with their tendrils spilling like a waterfall. There was a garden swing, set a ways back, made from pale wood with a heart carved at the crest of the backrest. Jeno was sitting on the swing, his feet shifting from heel to toe, making it glide gently. Beside him was an old man, Renjun guessed his grandfather, who gazed vacantly at the ground, but seemed to revive at least partially when Jeno placed a hand on top of his. Renjun turned the other way. Jeno’s mother was coming out from the house, carrying a pot from the stove, and Jeno’s sister, a couple years his senior, trailed behind, preoccupied by her cellphone and nearly bumping into her mother when she stopped suddenly to say hello to Renjun and his uncle.

“How old are you, Renjun?” Jeno’s mother asked as she rearranged the trays on the picnic table, trying to make room for more. They’d cooked enough to feed a small village.

“Fifteen,” he said.

“The same age as Jeno, then.” She smiled and, watching where Jeno’s sister sat at the table’s far end, said, “Joeun here just turned eighteen. She’ll be graduating at the end of the school year.”

Joeun offered Renjun a little wave in acknowledgement.

Renjun’s uncle leaned his arms on the table and caught her gaze. “You know, Joeun, I still think you should consider applying at Hanyang. It’s a great school. I think you’d fit in nicely there.” Hanyang University was where he worked, a private institute on Seoul’s eastside. He’d promised Renjun that he would take him to work with him one day so he could see it for himself.

“I still want to get into Korea or Yonsei,” she said.

“Lofty goals,” he responded lightly.

“Joeun is the top of her class,” Jeno’s mother said. “She got a perfect score on her PCSAT. If anyone could get in, it’s her.”

Joeun blushed. “ _Mom_. Stop bragging about me.”

“It’s true. And I’m not bragging. I’m just stating facts.”

“What did you want to study again, Joeun?” Renjun’s uncle asked.

“Chemical engineering.”

“You know, Hanyang University is actually famous for its engineering program --”

Renjun stopped listening then as Jeno approached the table, picking up two plates and beginning to stack them full of food. He saw Renjun looking at him, gave him a tiny smile, and walked back to the swing. Then he set his own plate to the side, and helped his grandfather to balance the other plate in his lap, guiding his shaky hands and saying, “Here -- are you hungry?” Renjun was struck by the image of it, young and old, the gentleness and patience with which Jeno moved and spoke; and he took his camcorder out, aimed it towards them, and began to record.

“What are you doing?” his uncle whispered. “Don’t be rude, Renjun. Put that away.”

Renjun remembered where he was, and lowered his camcorder. Sometimes, he got so wrapped up in capturing something, he forgot his manners. It was an impulse. He had trouble controlling it.

Jeno seemed to have noticed Renjun’s interest, and gave him a curious, cocked-brow glance, before returning attention to his grandfather.

\---

The next day, Renjun woke at what he thought was an especially early time, only to discover that his uncle was already up and active, fixing breakfast in the kitchen. Renjun took a seat at the table. Every inch of his uncle’s house was covered in interesting objects: souvenirs from trips overseas, gifts from coworkers and students, finds from antique stores. In the center of the table was a carved wooden duck. Renjun traced its lacquered feathers with his index finger.

“I’ll be back in the afternoon,” his uncle said. “Will you be alright here until I get back?” He taught one class during the university’s summer session, and so he worked every other weekday.

“I’ll be fine,” Renjun responded.

“If you don’t mind, could you hang the laundry out to dry once it’s finished?”

“Sure.”

“Thank you.” His uncle came over and placed several dishes in front of Renjun, rice and kimchi and a steaming bowl of soup. A traditional Korean breakfast. Renjun wondered if his uncle ever still made Chinese dishes, after living away so long. He sniffed the soup, recognized it as soybean paste stew, and took a sip of it. It was rich, salty, stomach-warming. Eagerly, he dug in.

After breakfast, his uncle double-checked the straightness of his tie in the kitchen window, then said, “If you need anything, call me. And if there’s an emergency, go next door.”

“Okay.”

His uncle left. Renjun heard the car’s engine shudder to life, and the rumbling of its wheels over gravel as he pulled out of the driveway. From the other room, the washing machine dinged, announcing its completed cycle, so Renjun gathered the wet clothes into a basket and carried them outside.

The clothesline ran from a hook in the house’s wall to a hook in the trunk of the big tree. Renjun began unfolding a white sheet, draping it over the thin wire and pinning it in place. Beyond the clothesline was the baby blue of the morning sky. Puffy white clouds bloomed amongst it like dandelions in a field of grass. Renjun suspected it would be a warm, but not stifling, summer day. Maybe he would take a walk. He knew that if he followed the road about ten minutes to the right, he would end up downtown. The downtown of his uncle’s village was really just a small grocery, a convenience store, a bank, and an auto shop; but when he’d passed through it on the car ride in the previous afternoon, he’d thought it was rather charming in its simplicity, and interesting in the sense that a place so near the big city could seem so lowkey in comparison, as if there weren’t skyscrapers standing only a mere forty-five minutes away. He wondered what lay in the other direction, further down his uncle’s road, which led windingly through the trees.

He heard a familiar creaking. He looked up to see Jeno, once again propping himself on the gate, this time with his feet stuck through between the rails of it and balanced on the bottom bar. “Hi,” he said. He wore a baseball cap, which cast a pale shadow over his eyes.

“Hi,” Renjun responded.

“Do you want to go for a bike ride?”

“I don’t have a bike.”

“You can borrow my sister’s.” Jeno leaned further forward, elbows on the top of the gate. Its hinges produced a shrieking whine.

Renjun hung up the last of the laundry, his uncle’s pajama shirt, and placed the empty basket just inside the back door. “Alright.”

He followed Jeno through the gate, across the rolling hill of grass, into the Lee family’s yard again. It was emptied of the previous night’s festivities, but not lifeless. A calico cat lay on the stone wall, tail flicking lazily. Jeno pushed up the kickstand of his bicycle and walked it around to the front of the house. Renjun did the same.

“Are you sure Joeun won’t care if I take her bike?”

“Nah. So long as you don’t crash it. You know how to ride one, right?”

“Of course I do,” Renjun said, almost offended at the question.

Jeno, at the street’s edge, looked back and forth both ways before hitching up onto his seat and riding out into the proper lane, headed right towards the shops. Renjun hung close behind him. An old, slow-moving car passed by them, stirring a breeze that lifted Renjun’s bangs. Above them, the telephone wire was buried beneath about a hundred little birds, perched close to each other, making black silhouettes against the blue sky.

“Do you like it here?” Jeno called to Renjun.

Renjun watched the tilt of Jeno’s shoulders as he pushed down against the bike handles. He could see the divot of his spine through the thin white fabric of his t-shirt. “Yeah. When my mom told me I was going to Seoul, I didn’t expect there to be this much nature.”

“We’re not really in Seoul.”

“I know. I was lied to.”

The air was filled by cicada buzz and the rustling of tall grass along the roadside. Renjun leaned further forward on his bike, squinting, like if he peered hard enough, he might be able to see right through Jeno.

“What’s wrong with your grandfather?” he asked. He’d been thinking about it since last evening. It might have been a rude question, but Renjun was bad at knowing when he was being rude, the same way he was bad at telling when he shouldn’t be recording something. His mother always told him he lacked self-awareness. He was not self-aware enough to understand what she meant by it.

Jeno seemed to know that Renjun was only rude out of naivety, not out of intention. “He has Alzheimer's,” he responded.

“What is that?”

“It means he can’t remember things.”

“Ah.” Renjun had not recognized the Korean word for it, but he knew what Jeno was talking about. “It must be hard to take care of him all the time.”

“He’s not a fish or something,” Jeno said flatly. “He’s my grandpa. I don’t mind doing it. It isn’t a chore.” Jeno lifted off his seat, putting more weight on the pedals, pulling further ahead and putting a stretch of black concrete between the two of them.

Renjun had at least enough sense to leave it there. Jeno might be the only friend he made all summer -- he didn’t want to drive him away.

They came upon the little intersection that made up the town center. Jeno veered into the grocery store parking lot and pushed his bicycle into the slot of the bike rack.

When the automatic doors parted, the cold of the A/C hit their faces. It was a tiny market, with too-low ceilings and too-narrow aisles. Jeno stuck only his head in at first, glanced around, and said, “Mr. Choi isn’t in today.”

“Who’s that?”

“He owns the store.”

Renjun thought there was something special about the fact that, in a town so small, everyone seemed to know everyone else. Renjun didn’t even know the name of his across-the-street neighbor back home.

Jeno walked ahead to the flats of vegetables, picking over the cabbages.

“What are you doing?” Renjun asked.

“My mom wants me to get some stuff for dinner.”

 _He’s always doing something for his family,_ Renjun thought. He wondered if Jeno ever got sick of it, even though he’d denied it on the way over. It seemed like Jeno was years older than him, a boy with more responsibilities than he should have for his age. Renjun felt like a child in comparison.

He removed his camcorder from the overly large pocket of his cargo shorts.

“You even brought that with you here?” Jeno asked.

“I bring it with me everywhere,” Renjun said. He flipped open the screen and fidgeted with the focus. Jeno emerged from the fuzziness, standing amongst the faded grocery store signs and vibrant vegetables.

“Am I supposed to be doing something?” Jeno shifted awkwardly. “Like, am I supposed to look at the camera, or --”

“No,” Renjun said. “Just do whatever.”

“What’s this even for?”

“It’s like a video diary.” Renjun had had the idea last night, before he fell asleep. He was going to compile all the footage he took on his trip and edit it together. Maybe he could make something interesting out of it. Then he could put it in his reel when he applied for college. He could show his parents, too, and maybe they’d be so blown away by his artistic vision they would wrap him in a hug and tell him he was destined to be a filmmaker and give him their seal of approval to pursue a major in it.

It was a long shot, but Renjun was a daydreamer, and he believed that if he dreamt about it hard enough, it might someday come true.

Jeno quirked his lips up in a lopsided, try-hard smile for the camera, and Renjun laughed.

When they approached the register, Jeno grabbed two cokes from the case and set them onto the belt. After they exited, Jeno handed one to Renjun, and the two of them sat on the curb of the sidewalk beneath the market awning, bodies in the shade aside from their feet and ankles, which stuck out into the bright near-noon sunlight, making their exposed skin look brightly pale.

Renjun cracked the tab on his soda, and sucked up the bubbles that gathered at its lip. The fizz made him shiver. “Thank you,” he told Jeno.

“Whenever I go to the store, my mom gives me extra money to buy a soda,” Jeno explained. “She left more than usual today, so I figured that was a sign.”

“Your mom is nice,” Renjun said.

“Yeah.”

“What does she do?”

“She’s a nurse at the hospital the next town over.”

“What about your dad?”

“He’s a pediatrician.”

“Ah.” _The medical types,_ Renjun thought smartly, as if that meant anything to him. He imagined Jeno as a child running rampant around his father’s clinic -- playing with the toys in the waiting room, asking his father to lift him onto the exam table and, as he did so, stealing the stethoscope from around his shoulders, putting the ends in his ears, and trying to find his father’s heartbeat.

“What about you? What do your parents do?” Jeno asked.

“My mom is a teacher. My dad is an urban planner.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Jeno said.

“Me neither,” Renjun admitted. “He works for the government, I think.”

“What does your mom teach?”

“History,” he responded. “She teaches at the elementary school in my town.”

Jeno grinned. “Did you have her as a teacher? That’s funny.”

Renjun pursed his lips. He _did_ have his mother as a teacher in the sixth grade. It was not very funny to him, because all the other kids had given him a hard time for it. Once, he’d returned to the classroom after recess and his mother had called him to the front board because he had a spot of dirt on his cheek. She had wet her thumb and rubbed it away, while he had attempted to squirm out of her grasp, muttering, “Mom -- not right now --” His mother, unbothered, had said, “Stay still, sweetie, I’ve nearly got it.” The other kids had been snickering at their desks and leaning over the aisles to exchange smirks. He would never live it down. He’d spent the rest of the school year in isolation, and the only times the others spoke with him was to chide “sweetie” at him in the hall, as if he didn’t already get picked on enough for being an airhead and a klutz.

“I don’t like school very much,” Renjun said.

“Because of your mom?”

“No. Just in general.” Renjun pressed his cool coke can to a bruise on his knee, acquired when he’d climbed the tree the previous evening and bumped it on a branch. “What about you? Do you like school?”

“Mm-hmm.”

Renjun wondered if school was much different in Korea than in China. He realized he didn’t know very much about it, about life in Korea in general, outside of his uncle’s little rural town. “What do you like about school?”

“I’m on the soccer team,” Jeno explained. “So that’s fun. And that’s where I get to see all my friends. Most of them live right in the city, since my school is in Seoul, so I don’t get to see them much outside of class, unless my dad wants to drive me forty-five minutes.”

_Soccer team. All my friends._

Renjun tilted his head. “Oh. Are you one of the popular kids at your school?”

Jeno’s face reddened. “I don’t know about that --”

“You are. I can tell. Are you the soccer team’s captain?”

“Yes,” Jeno admitted.

“And you get good grades?”

“I… I do.”

“Oh yeah. Definitely a popular kid,” Renjun remarked. He had never really been friends with someone like that before. He only had about three-ish friends back home, except one of them had borrowed his _Reservoir Dogs_ DVD a month ago and never returned it so Renjun was considering cutting him out of the friend group until he got his priorities in order. Then he would only have two-ish friends, though it didn’t bother him much. He couldn’t really imagine what it was like to have a lot of friends. He didn’t see the need for having so many.

He was glad that Jeno didn’t see his friends much during the summer. It meant that he didn’t have to be friends with Jeno the Popular Boy. It meant he could simply be friends with Jeno the Boy Next-Door.

Jeno straightened his legs off the curb and craned his head backwards in a stretch. Renjun imitated him, and when he did, the toes of their sneakers bumped.

\---

Renjun’s uncle pulled into a space in the Hanyang University parking lot. Peering out the passenger’s seat window, Renjun could not help but be impressed at the sight of the campus, the mix of white stone, columned facades and full-glass buildings, their lines so clean they seemed to cut squares from the blue cloth of the sky. The only college Renjun had been to before was on a field trip in the fifth grade, to get the students to start thinking about their futures. Naturally, Renjun had gotten distracted by an old-looking book that sat on a library shelf during their tour. He’d swerved to examine it (it was about Greek mythology, a topic he knew little about, but found himself absorbed in the book’s sketchy but evocative illustrations), and then when he’d turned around, the rest of his class was gone. He’d spent the next fifteen minutes wandering through the shelves, not even able to find the door they’d entered through, and he’d become worried about being left behind once his classmates boarded the bus. _They probably haven’t even noticed I’m gone,_ he’d thought. _Or, they’ve noticed, and they don’t care. They’re probably all laughing about it right now, about how much of a ditz I am._ He’d been so upset over his imagined scenario that he began bawling right there in the middle of the library. Luckily, a college student had noticed him (he’d been difficult to not notice, considering how loudly he’d cried), and had helped him to find the rest of his class, who had moved on to the dining hall for lunch. The other kids could clearly see that he’d been crying, and he’d known they would make fun of him for it. He’d ended up sitting at the table with their teacher, poking silently at his tray of cafeteria food, not at all hungry.

Renjun was still a little wary of college campuses, to say the least.

But he was excited, too. He was much closer now to thinking about college than he had been a few years ago. And now he had something he was passionate about, a dream he wanted to achieve. He did not yet know where he wanted to achieve it, but maybe Hanyang University could give him a better idea, whether that meant drawing him in or chasing him away.

They crossed from the parking lot to a breezeway, which led between two buildings into the campus proper. It was mostly empty during the summer session, but there were a few people who passed by them, as well as a tour group, headed by an overly-cheerful guide in a highlighter blue tee who walked backwards as he spoke. Renjun’s uncle noticed him staring after them, and said, “So? What do you think?”

Renjun tore his eyes away from the tour group and scored the courtyard around them. It was a very pretty campus. Almost utopian -- full hedges lining the pathways, beautiful beds of violet flowers, idyllic greenery amongst crystal buildings that glittered beneath the summer sun. He thought it seemed impossible in its sleekness, its shininess. Like a little model town, totally separate from the rest of the world. It was so immaculate that it was strange to think that people really worked and lived there, because if they did, shouldn’t it be just a bit messier, a bit less ideal?

“I like it,” Renjun said.

His uncle gave a subtle, satisfied smile. “Have you decided what college you want to go to yet?” he asked nonchalantly, as if Renjun might not notice his intent.

“Well… I hadn’t been thinking about going to school outside of China.”

“It might be a new adventure for you. Just like this summer is a new adventure. Plus, you already speak Korean well, so it wouldn’t be difficult for you to fit in.”

“Hmm.” Renjun tried not to be too easily swayed. Though he was impressed, he was sure there were other impressive universities closer to home. Just because it was the first school he liked didn’t mean he had to start making plans, especially when he still had three years of high school left.

“Professor Huang!”

They turned to see a girl bounding up to them from behind, the shadows thrown by the courtyard trees dappling her beneath them.

“Heejung,” Renjun’s uncle called. “How are you?”

“I’m good.” She slowed to a halt, catching her breath through a huge grin. “This is your nephew, right?”

“Yes --” Renjun’s uncle gave him a little push on the back, forcing him to bow. “Renjun, this is Heejung, one of my students. She’s working at the admissions office this summer. I told her you’d be visiting today.” Then, in a clearly predetermined, overacted manner, he made his mouth into a little _o_ and added, “I just had a thought! Heejung, how would you feel about giving Renjun a tour?”

“But I thought I was going with you to your office,” Renjun objected.

“This would be much more exciting, Renjun. You don’t want to watch me organizing class materials all afternoon, do you?”

Renjun understood suddenly that this was all an elaborate set-up. First he'd tried to lure in Joeun, and now his own nephew. His uncle certainly took a lot of pride in Hanyang, if he was trying to attract so many new students.

“Alright,” Renjun conceded grudgingly.

Just a minute later, his uncle was walking away, waving over his shoulder, leaving Renjun in Heejung’s care. She placed her hands on her hips, and smiled so hard it showed her dimples. “Well, then. Let’s get started! I’ve got so many different things to show you -- the residence halls are a must, of course, and the student union -- oh, and we could swing by the university museum…”

Renjun trailed a pace behind her, fascinated by the yellow ribbon in her hair. Its loops were perfectly even in length, and the fabric was shiny like gold foil, especially bright against her black hair. That was the sort of random little thing he got caught up in, the smallest details that seemed like they ought to be preserved on film. His camcorder was in his backpack, but he resisted the urge to take it out. He thought that filming the back of her head might be too weird, even for him.

She led him away from the garden-carpeted courtyard and into another section of the campus. There, she opened the door for him into a long, rectangular building with blue-tinted windows. Inside, Renjun discovered that the many floors above him were cut out in the middle, allowing him to see all the way to the glass roof. Hanging from it were strings of flags from all around the world, their fabric made semi-transparent by the sunlight.

“This is the student union,” Heejung explained. “There’s a flag for every country represented by an international student at Hanyang. Look -- the Chinese flag is right there.” She pointed up and towards the left. Renjun saw it, the little red flag, sitting between Canada and the Czech Republic. He felt a little twinge of belonging when he saw it. _This,_ he knew he had to film. He dropped his backpack from his shoulders and pulled out his camcorder, then zoomed in on his flag.

Heejung detoured into a little coffee shop that branched off from the building’s main lobby, where she told Renun he could choose whatever he wanted as her treat. He picked an iced green tea latte, and while they waited for the barista to make it, he kept peering through his viewfinder, scanning the shop from high to low, trying to capture it. At a table in the corner was a student typing on his laptop, earbuds in, pausing to take a sip of their coffee. Renjun imagined himself in that place, and something about it spoke to him -- being alone but not being uncomfortable, having work to do that meant something, spending his own money on a drink or a snack and knowing he’d earned it himself. Adulthood was seductive in its simplest pleasures. He felt himself falling fast for that kind of future, for what Hanyang offered.

Once they had their drinks, they sipped at them as they climbed the long white steps of one of the campus’s columned buildings, pushing in through the wide front doors. “This is the College of Economics,” she explained. “I’m actually an economics major, so this is where a lot of my classes are. I thought I could show you some of our classrooms --”

Renjun sighed as his perfect college daydream shattered. Economics. That seemed like the kind of thing his parents might like him to study. Something serious and prestigious and guaranteed to get him a job after he graduated.

Heejung poked her head into one of the classroom doors to make sure it wasn’t occupied, then beckoned him after her. It was a big lecture hall, one that descended in rows down to a podium, with a large whiteboard in the back, the remnants of the previous lecture still visible in faded green marker: microeconomics, consumer demand, market structure. Heejung walked down a few rows, and said, “Isn’t it cool? This room can seat three hundred students at once.” Her voice echoed like she was in a cave.

“Yeah, I guess so.” Renjun tried to picture himself, one face among three hundred. It didn’t thrill him. It made him feel insignificant. He tried to film it, but he’d lost his inspiration. He lowered his camcorder, arm dropping to his side.

“What’s wrong?” Heejung asked, smile faltering. “Am I already boring you?”

“Oh, no, it’s not like that,” Renjun responded hurriedly, not wanting to hurt her feelings. “I guess I was just expecting it to be kinda different.”

She sat at the edge of one of the rows of seats, knee bumping a chair and making it swivel. “Was there something specific you had in mind? Like, something you really wanted to see?”

Renjun hesitated before answering, “Well… I guess I was wondering if Hanyang had a film program.”

She took a contemplative sip from her smoothie. “I know we have one, but I’m afraid I don’t know much about it. I’m not very familiar with the College of Arts. Is that the kind of thing you want to go to school for?”

Renjun nodded enthusiastically. “I want to make movies. See, I’ve been filming stuff all summer --” He held his camcorder back up and tapped a finger against the plastic of the back of the screen. “-- for my demo reel.”

She was taken aback by the sudden passion in his eyes. But it was the kind of passion she’d been trying to pull out of him all afternoon and, recognizing it, she grinned. “Well -- if it’s that important to you, let’s see if we can find the film department. I think I might kind of know where the facilities are.”

They exited the College of Economics and walked west across campus, back towards the way they’d come. Heejung led him, inexplicably, into the university’s tech institute, where all the flyers on the walls were advertising courses in computer science and cyber security. However, she veered off towards the basement stairway, which spiraled downwards, and as it did, the flyers evolved into movie posters, stuck haphazardly to the walls with gaffer tape. They finally came out into the basement level, and Renjun was breathless at the sight of it, because it wasn’t sleek and and pretty like the rest of the campus; instead, it was messy, the walls brightly painted and covered in a collage of even more posters, some of movies he’d seen, others advertising student films, the Hanyang logo displayed in the bottom corners. Across from him and Heejung was a tall equipment cage, stuffed to bursting with lighting sets, boom poles, shelves of those big fancy cameras Renjun had seen in the movies, but never in person. A TV was mounted on the far wall, playing a reel of student work -- at present, it showed some kind of short action film, a sequence of a man running down a hallway under stark red lights as fog rose around his ankles. Renjun walked a little closer, head tilted back in awe. It looked so real. It looked like something that could play in a theater, like something made by a professional. The kind of film he wanted to create.

Then the credits scrolled. Renjun always sat through the credits when he watched a movie, so he could imagine that his own name was up there among the others, proof that he’d made something. Proof that he’d made art.

“What do you think?” Heejung asked him. “I’ve never been down here before. It looks different than I’d imagined.”

“It’s incredible,” Renjun whispered.

\---

The next day, he awoke excited. He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the colorful basement where the film students worked when he’d gone to bed last night, and when he finally had fallen asleep, he’d gone on to dream about it -- arriving to class with a green tea latte in hand, approaching his posse of cool new college friends, pitching his film idea in front of all of them (something about a boy trying to choose which college to attend) and being met by enthusiastic offers to be his camera operator, his boom guy, his editor.

He wanted to tell Jeno all about Hanyang. He rolled out of bed, realized he’d slept in until eleven o’clock, and hurriedly pulled open his dresser drawer to find a change of clothes.

Once dressed, he raced downstairs and out the door, offering a mumbled “good morning” to his uncle as he whisked by. He ran all the way to the Lees’ door and knocked more times than typically considered polite.

Jeno answered a moment later. He did not seem as excited to see Renjun as Renjun was to see him. Rather, he was timid, rubbing his lips together, chin tucked in, standing back from the door like trying to shrink into the shadows of his house.

Renjun did not quite pick up on this. “Jeno -- I have so many things to tell you about. I went with my uncle to his work yesterday, and -- do you want to go for a walk? We can go downtown and --”

“I can’t today,” Jeno said. “My parents are at work, and Joeun is at a study group with her friends. I have to watch my grandfather.”

“Oh.” Renjun could not hide the disappointed slump of his shoulders. Quickly, he picked them back up, reassuming his cheer. “We can hang out here, then, if you want.”

“I don’t think that’s a great idea…” Jeno, instinctively, glanced back to where his grandfather sat on the living room sofa, hunched over, staring at the empty space above the TV screen. “I’m busy, Renjun. Maybe tomorrow.”

Renjun was hurt. Jeno was his only friend in Korea, and he’d already talked his uncle’s ears off about Hanyang, so he didn’t have anyone else to blab to. He couldn’t even call his parents and tell them -- they wouldn’t approve of his interest in film school. “Fine, I guess,” he muttered, knowing he was being childish but unable to help it. He backed down from the front step without saying goodbye, and marched all the way back to his uncle’s yard.

He felt too bitter to go inside and have to visit with his uncle, so he opted to climb the tree again, finding the nice firm branch he’d used the last time and curling into the place where it met the trunk, arms crossed and brow furrowed. Why wouldn’t Jeno let him in? He could be well-behaved around old people. In fact, it was the time his manners were the best, instilled into him by his parents who insisted he always bow the deepest to the elderly. He’d be a good helper, too, if only Jeno had let him. He continued to scowl at the thought of his dismissal.

He stayed in the tree a while, plucking leaves from above his head and shredding them into little pieces, then letting them rain down onto the ground below him like confetti. This was not satisfying enough, so instead he started gathering acorns and throwing them at the squirrels that rummaged at the tree trunks, delighting every time he managed to spook one. Their bushy tails would shoot up like exclamation points and they would scamper off under the bushes to hide. The sight of it cooled his frustration.

“Hey.”

Renjun was surprised when he recognized it to be Jeno’s voice. He shifted to look over the other side of the branch, where Jeno stood beneath, grandfather beside him.

“I changed my mind,” Jeno called up. “We can go for a walk, if you want.”

Renjun smiled, then remembered he was supposed to be sulky, so he put his pout back on and took his sweet time descending the oak, making Jeno wait. Once his feet hit the grass, Jeno turned, leading the way to the roadside.

“Nice of you to include me, finally,” Renjun said snidely.

“I thought you looked pathetic in your tree.”

Renjun wished that Jeno was not capable of such formidable sass. It made it difficult to win arguments. “What changed your mind?”

“It’s been a long time since he went for a walk,” Jeno answered, gesturing towards his grandfather. “We used to go a lot, but they aren’t so easy for him these days, especially when it's hot. But it’s mild out today, and I guess he should get some exercise.” Jeno tapped his grandfather’s arm gently. “Grandpa. This is Renjun. He lives next door.”

His grandfather looked up at Renjun through his glasses with squinted eyes, mouth open. He had a square face, its geometry exaggerated by the straight lines of his wrinkles, and wispy white hair that caught in the breeze like downy feathers. “Do I know him?” Jeno’s grandfather asked.

“No, Grandpa. This is your first time meeting him.”

His grandfather mumbled something inaudible under his breath, looked away from Renjun, and continued to hobble forward along the road’s dusty edge.

“I don’t think he likes me,” Renjun said.

“He is neutral on you,” Jeno offered, as if that was reassuring. “And stop walking so fast. He has to go slow, so we have to stay at his pace.”

Renjun reluctantly began to take smaller steps. It made him want to sprint instead.

But as he moved slower, he began to notice finer details, things he wouldn’t have noticed if he were more impatient. Jeno had placed himself to his grandfather’s right, so that he was the one close to the road, and his grandfather closer to the grass. It was a little thing that perhaps he had done subconsciously, but Renjun thought it spoke volumes, that protective instinct showing through.

His hand found the large pocket of his shorts, feeling his camcorder through the flap.

“Can I film you?” he asked Jeno.

Jeno smirked. “You’re asking permission this time?”

Renjun’s face flushed. “I’m trying to be more considerate.”

“I guess that’s fine.”

Renjun took out his camcorder, and slowed even more, so he walked several paces behind. Here, he was able to get both Jeno and his grandfather in the shot from behind. Jeno’s grandfather seemed awfully small beside his grandson, back hunched over as he took tiny, shuffling steps. Renjun’s grandparents were quite a bit younger, so he didn’t often interact with people so old, except for the ancient geezer who lived down his street and threw shoes at the kids who accidentally walked on his grass.

Jeno’s grandfather hooked his hand at Jeno’s elbow to steady himself. His hand was all bone, the skin over it loose and paperthin. The veins bulged underneath, and dark spots trailed from his knuckles to his wrist, borne from age and wear. It looked so unlike Jeno’s hand, only a few inches away, where the prominent bones were a sign of gauky, in-progress adolescence rather than frailty. 

“Where are we going?” Jeno’s grandfather asked.

“I told you,” Jeno said. “We’re going to the store.”

“The store?”

“Yeah. You remember. Mr. Choi works there.”

“I don’t remember.”

“That’s okay. He’s a nice man. You’ll like him.”

Renjun kept recording. He was fascinated at Jeno’s patience, at the slight bend of his brows that indicated taking care of his grandfather made him terribly sad, but it was a sadness he was accustomed to.

“So what did you want to talk to me about?”

Renjun did not realize Jeno was talking to him for a second. “What?”

“You said you had something to tell me.”

“Oh!” He’d completely forgotten about it. Hurriedly, he caught up to Jeno’s free side, and said, “I went to Hanyang University with my uncle yesterday. There was a student there who gave me a campus tour.”

“That’s cool. What was it like?”

“It was awesome.” Thinking about it again, Renjun could not help but put a bounce in his step. “I got to see the film department -- they had these huge cameras like the kinds they use on real movie sets! And I saw some bits from their student films -- I couldn’t believe that they were made by college kids, they looked so professional --”

“Are you thinking about applying there?”

“Maybe,” Renjun said. “I’m going to look at other schools, too, but… I really liked it there.” He poked Jeno’s arm (an invasive gesture which Jeno shied away from) and asked, “What about you? Have you thought at all about where you want to go to college?”

“I want to go to an S.K.Y. school. They’re the three most prestigious schools in Korea,” Jeno explained. “I think I want to go to whichever one Joeun goes to -- right now, she likes Korea University best. But if I can’t get into that one, I at least want to get into one of the three.”

Renjun mouthed a voiceless _wow_. “You really have the grades to get in?”

“Yeah. I’m the top of my class. I think I can do it, if I study hard enough.”

 _Leave it to two medical professionals to produce two genius kids,_ Renjun thought. _I bet Jeno’s parents were top of their class, too._ “What do you want to study?”

“I want to get into their pre-med program. I want to be a pediatrician, like my dad.”

“Oh. You’d have to go to medical school after that, then, too?”

“Yeah.” Jeno laughed. “It’s lucky I like school so much. Otherwise I wouldn’t survive it.”

They entered the store. A man who had not been there the last time saw them enter, left his broom leaning against the counter, and approached.

“You brought your grandfather,” he said to Jeno, voice high and incredulous. “It’s been a long time.”

Jeno glanced around the store -- almost nervously, Renjun thought -- and gave the man a little bow. “Yeah. He needed a little exercise.” He touched his grandfather on the shoulder. “This is Mr. Choi, Grandpa. Do you remember him?”

His grandfather didn’t answer, only squinted at Mr. Choi, puzzlement obvious.

“No problem,” Mr. Choi said. “It’s been a while. How about drinks, for all three of you?” He grinned at Renjun. “It’s on me.”

“That’s okay,” Jeno responded hurriedly. “You don’t have to do that.”

“I don’t mind it.”

“Really, you don’t --”

Renjun jabbed Jeno in the ribs. “Jeno. It’s free drinks.”

Jeno quieted as a blush rose on his neck.

They exited with bottles of tea, which Jeno assisted his grandfather with opening. Renjun gulped half of his down in a single go, and said, “Mr. Choi sure is nice.”

“I think he just wanted us gone,” Jeno murmured.

Renjun eyed him curiously. “What? Why?”

“Hey -- Grandpa,” Jeno scolded, stopping and tugging up the sleeve of his hoodie to wipe his grandfather’s chin. “You’re spilling it. Be careful.”

“Oh… I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. Let me carry that for you.”

They began to shuffle ahead. Renjun sipped his tea, walking slowly, leaving his unanswered questions to be swept away by the wind.

\---

It was a quiet afternoon. Renjun knelt on one of the kitchen chairs, assembling a jigsaw puzzle across the table. He’d begun to run out of other things to do, now that he’d scoped out the entirety of the backyard and the trees beyond it, and his uncle’s computer was so old and slow that it was torture to try and operate with Renjun’s limited patience. However, his uncle’s house was filled with _things_ , including stacks of jigsaws that Renjun had discovered in the upstairs closet. And while he was not really a puzzle person, he found that they were nice to do once in a while. Quiet activities could be a pleasant reset for the brain, a different way to channel his energy.

His uncle was standing beyond the island counter, cleaning the outdated leftovers from the fridge. He raised his head to observe Renjun’s work, and asked, “Why aren’t you doing the outer pieces first?”

“What do you mean?” Renjun looked down at his progress questioningly.

“You should do the pieces on the outside first, then fill the middle in. It’s easier. Have you never done a puzzle before?”

“Of course I’ve --”

There was a knock at the door. Renjun leapt from his chair and bounded over to answer it.

“Hey,” Jeno said. He stood on the front step with hands shoved into his shorts pockets, legs bowed in an awkward stance, eyes downturned. “Can I come hang out here today?”

“Okay,” Renjun said, knowing his uncle would not be bothered by it. He stepped back to let Jeno in. “I’m doing a puzzle right now. Wanna do it with me?”

Jeno settled at the chair beside him, and poked around at the disconnected pieces. “You know, you’re supposed to start with the edge pieces.”

Renjun’s uncle laughed from near the fridge.

“If you’re going to make fun of my puzzle-making process,” Renjun said, “I’ll kick you out.”

Jeno, surprisingly, did not argue. He picked up one piece, turned it over as if examining it, though Renjun could tell he was really barely paying attention. His bottom lip jutted, and he refused to look up from the table. Even his breathing seemed forced, like he was counting every breath he took, performing it with robotic carefulness.

“Are you okay?” Renjun asked him. “You look sad.”

“I’m okay.”

“Did something happen?”

That jutted bottom lip began to tremble, and Jeno pressed his hands over his eyes. His shoulders shook with silent sobs.

Renjun’s uncle noticed and crossed the kitchen, crouching beside Jeno’s chair. “What’s the matter, Jeno?”

“My grandpa had a stroke this morning,” he managed between shaky inhales. “While I was watching him. He’s at the hospital right now.”

“Oh, dear.” Renjun’s uncle stood again and placed a hand on Jeno’s head, holding him in a half-hug, running his fingers through his hair. “I’m sorry that happened. Are your parents home right now?”

“They’re are at the hospital with him -- my mom told me I should stay home, ‘cause it might take awhile before they get any news --”

Renjun shuffled his puzzle pieces around uncomfortably. He never knew how to talk to sad people. Ever since his mother told him he lacked self-awareness, he was afraid of saying anything that might make it worse.

Luckily, his uncle seemed to have control of things. He put a guiding arm around Jeno’s shoulder and brought him into the living room. Then he took the blanket from the back of the sofa and wrapped it around him, gesturing for him to sit. Renjun followed a few paces behind, hovering in the archway to the living room.

“Renjun,” his uncle said. “Come on. I’m going to make some hot chocolate for the two of you, so take a seat.”

Renjun did as he was told, and settled beside Jeno on the couch, making sure there were a few inches between them. He wrung his hands, not sure what he was meant to be doing. Jeno sniffled beside him. Renjun reached to retrieve a tissue box from the end stand, and held it out to Jeno, who took it with a blush-muddled frown, as if he was ashamed for Renjun to see him crying. Renjun searched for the remote next, turning on the news on the TV so there was a little noise to fill the quiet.

Jeno said, “I must look really silly right now.”

“What do you mean?” Renjun asked, incredulous. “Silly how? It’s normal to cry when something like that happens.” Renjun decided that Jeno must not be a boy who cried often. He could not relate -- he cried at least once a month, usually when he saw a sad movie or embarrassed himself at school and had to hide in the boys’ bathroom and let the frustrated tears out.

“I don’t know,” Jeno muttered. He crumpled his tissue in his hands, knuckles folding, fingers working anxiously.

“Your grandpa must be pretty wonderful, huh?” Renjun tried, hoping it wouldn’t make Jeno sadder to think of him. Maybe it would be a good thing to talk about it.

He was pleased to see a tiny smile break on Jeno’s lips. “Yeah. I was always close to him, ever since I was little. He wasn’t always like he is now. He was -- _is_ \-- so wise and handy and funny.” He lifted his head, gaze flickering as he dredged up a memory. “When I was really small, I remember he used to read this book to me all the time. A picture book, about a puppy. He read it to me so many times that I memorized it. Then _I_ would read it to _him_ , though not properly -- I was too young to read, I just knew all the words by heart, because he taught them to me.”

Renjun found it hard to picture the man he’d met -- small, fragile, eyes vacant -- the way Jeno described him. Alzheimer’s, he thought, must be something transformative, destructive. It was terrifying to consider how it could break a person down into something unrecognizable.

“He used to be a surgeon, too, you know,” Jeno went on. Now that Renjun had invited him to talk, it seemed he couldn’t stop, as if he’d been storing the words up for ages, just waiting for someone to ask him to share them. “A really good one. He used to let me go through all his books where they showed these anatomy diagrams. He taught me all the bones in the human body, and we’d gotten started on the muscles, too, before… before his memory started going bad.”

“You know the names of all the bones?”

“Yup. An adult has two hundred and six bones. Did you know that?”

“No. That seems like too many.”

Jeno laughed, though his eyes were still red from crying. The combination of the two gave Renjun a strange feeling -- something like admiration. It tickled in his stomach, like a feather being tossed about, its soft vane ghosting over his ribs.

“Jeno,” he said. “Do you ever talk to your friends about this kind of thing? About your grandfather?”

Jeno, taken aback at the question, tugged the blanket more tightly around himself, like a turtle retreating into its shell. “I don’t know… no. I guess I don’t. It’d be weird to talk to them about it.”

“Why?”

“It’s just hard to talk about. I don’t even talk to my parents about it much.” He drew his legs up under the blanket, rested his arm on his knees, and pressed his mouth against the back of his hand, making his words muffled. “Especially my mom. She already lost her mother a few years ago. And when my grandpa dies, she won’t have either of her parents. Even mentioning something like that makes her really upset. So I try not to bother her about it.”

Jeno was too conscientious, Renjun realized, to burden others with his troubles. Perhaps that made him a good son. Or perhaps it was a recipe for disaster.

Renjun’s uncle came sweeping in from the kitchen, mismatched mugs in either hand. “Hot cocoa’s done,” he announced, setting them down on the coffee table. “Renjun. Why don’t you run upstairs to the closet and go through those boxes again? I think I have some board games, too. They might make a welcome distraction.” He glanced at Jeno. “Does that sound okay?”

“Yeah. It sounds fun.”

Renjun made his way to the stairs. He watched the back of Jeno’s head and the tension of his blanketed shoulders between the balusters, walking slowly, slowly up the steps, until he disappeared from sight.

\---

About halfway through Renjun’s summer vacation, his uncle decided it was time to do some spring cleaning, though spring was long past. He started early in the morning, and Renjun was awoken by the sound of boxes being moved about and stacked in the hallway outside his bedroom. He crawled out of bed and pushed open the door, rubbing his still-sleepy eyes.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’ve decided I have too much stuff,” his uncle had said. “I’m packing it up and tossing it. Or donating it, if it’s worthwhile.”

Renjun could not picture that house minus the clutter. It was an integral part of its personality, and made it so that everyday revealed new surprises. Renjun had only realized just the day before that there was a ceramic owl sitting on top of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, staring at you as you sat on the toilet or stepped out of the shower. He’d nearly had a heart attack at the sight of it.

Still, he got dressed and began to help his uncle to sort through his belongings. It was an arduous process, as those belongings were tucked everywhere, unreachable on high shelves and stashed in corners and hidden beneath tables. Renjun would discover some odd knick knack, hold it up in the air, and ask, “Yes or no?” His uncle would give it an appraising look, scratching his chin, and make a decision. After a while, Renjun realized that his uncle was barely tossing anything, and made it his duty to argue him out of his more pointless keepsakes.

“Yes or no?” he asked, lifting the wooden duck on the kitchen table.

“No,” his uncle responded. “I like that one.”

“It doesn’t even do anything. It’s just a duck. And not even a real one.”

“But it has charm.”

“Can you even remember where you got it?”

His uncle hesitated for too long before answering. Renjun promptly placed the duck in his box.

“You need to be more discerning. Otherwise, you’ll keep everything.”

“Fine,” his uncle conceded. “I suppose it’s a good thing you’re here. I would not be very productive on my own, huh?”

Renjun grinned, and turned the doorknob with his elbow. With some difficulty, He lugged the now-full box down the steps and set it at the side of the house where it would be out of the way.

“What are you doing?”

Renjun looked up to see Jeno at the fence, eyeing the box curiously.

“We’re cleaning all the old weird stuff out of my uncle’s house. Do you wanna help?”

“Okay.” Jeno walked across the lawn and followed Renjun back inside. He ordinarily would have had to watch his grandfather on a day like this one, Renjun thought, but after he’d gotten back from the hospital, his mother had taken the week off to look after him herself. He was doing okay, Jeno had said. He was recovering, slowly but surely, and though he was still bedridden, the doctors said he should be back on his feet soon, as it had been a relatively minor stroke. Renjun was glad to hear it -- he wasn’t sure how Jeno would have coped if the news had been worse.

Renjun’s uncle was sorting through his pots and pans, stacking them on the kitchen counter and evaluating them. When he saw Jeno, he said, “Lovely to have another helper. If you see anything you like, you can have it, okay?”

“Are you sure?” Jeno asked.

“Of course. In fact, you may want to check my office closet. There are a lot of books in there. I know you like that kind of thing.”

Renjun led Jeno upstairs to his uncle’s office. Renjun was not often allowed in there, as it was a minefield of precariously stacked papers which apparently had some kind of organization, though Renjun could not quite figure out how his uncle managed to maintain it. He picked over the mess towards the closet, which was already half-open, heaps of books spilling out across the wood floor, some lying with their pages splayed and spines bent open.

“Whoa,” Jeno said, sitting down cross-legged beside them and picking one up. “Your uncle sure has a lot of stuff.”

“No kidding.” Renjun settled beside him, amazed at the variety -- cookbooks, textbooks, cheesy-looking romance novels from twenty years ago. He could not think of one good reason for a person to own all of these, especially since they seemed as though they had not been touched in an eternity. Dust coated their covers, and Renjun blew on one of them, creating a cloud of flecks.

Jeno cracked open one of the books, tracing a finger down the page, the banded light from the half-blinded window dancing in his eyes. His mouth moved silently as he read, both subtle and distinct -- Renjun could pick out the _t_ as his teeth touched his lip, the flick of his tongue on the _l,_ though it all blurred together so that Renjun could not catch the phrases in whole. It made him want to lean in and turn his ear towards him, as if Jeno were murmuring a beautiful secret, and he desperately needed to know what it was.

Renjun pulled his camcorder from his pocket.

“There you go again,” Jeno said. Renjun had gotten so used to his unspoken reading that that sound of his voice surprised him. “Did inspiration strike you or something?”

“Yes.”

“You know, it’s not very helpful if you’re just filming me. You could be sorting through these with me.”

“Can’t help it,” Renjun said. “It’s my artistic imperative.”

Jeno rolled his eyes, and continued to read.

Renjun kept rolling, finger on the zoom, eyes locked on Jeno’s lips.

\---

Renjun finally convinced his uncle to drive him to the movies on a dreary Saturday. The nearest theatre was about twenty minutes away, a little further than his uncle was typically willing to drive, except Renjun had made it a point that morning to express his boredom in the most annoying ways possible.

“Uncle,” he’d whined, lying on the living room floor, his legs in the air, feet propped against the window sill. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself today. I can’t even play outside. Look at the rain. I’d be soaked in five minutes.”

“There’s plenty to do,” his uncle had insisted. “You could read a book. I have shelves full of them.”

“Books are lame,” he’d muttered. “And you don’t even have any movies to watch. You only have old Chinese dramas on VHS. I’ve never even heard of most of them.” Then he’d perked up a little, flipping over onto his stomach and perching his chin on his palms. “I just had an idea! What if you took me to the movies?”

“You asked me that last week. I told you, there aren’t any theaters in town.”

“But there’s one the next town over.” Renjun had put on his puppy-dog eyes. “You’d have two hours to yourself. And I won’t bother you again for the rest of the summer.”

When his uncle had finally broken down and said yes, Renjun had gone and called Jeno on the phone. Movies were always more fun with friends.

Presently, his uncle dropped them off outside the cinema and they went inside. It was a tiny place, with only five theaters and chipping green wall paint in the lobby. Renjun had checked their current screenings online before they’d left, and decided they would see an American film he’d never heard of, because it was the only thing screening right then that wasn’t a cheesy rom-com or a kids movie, and because the trailer had promised “non-stop action and thrills,” which sounded tantalizing after a movie-less summer.

They made their way into their row, exactly in the theater’s center as Renjun preferred. They were the only ones there, aside from a couple in the far back, who Renjun feared would maybe start getting handsy or something during the movie, so he devoted himself to staring straight ahead for the next two hours. Jeno had bought a bucket of popcorn and tilted it in Renjun’s direction. As the lights dimmed and the trailers started, Renjun reached for a handful without looking, only for their fingers to bump clumsily together.

Renjun snapped his hand back, holding it in his lap.

“Sorry,” Jeno said. He nudged the bag closer. “Have some.”

“That’s okay,” Renjun said. He was suddenly nervous, though he couldn’t place why. He shoved that nervousness to the back of his brain where it belonged, and focused instead on the movie as it started. It was a spy thriller, Bond-wannabe type thing, where the main character was a down-and-out thug who was recruited by the US government for his immense skill in deception as a spy. Not exactly an original premise, but Renjun thought cliches could be fun once in a while, so he was sufficiently entertained. He was so sucked in, he’d forgotten Jeno beside him, and went to prop his arm on the rest between them, only to bump elbows this time rather than hands. Then he was nervous again, heart thumping, too aware of his body and the space he took up. Against his better judgment, he turned to look at the couple in the back of the theater.

Only fifteen minutes in, and they were making out, the girl practically in the guy’s lap, looking as if she was trying to chew his face off.

Renjun’s face went vibrant red. He quickly turned back, trying to look anywhere but at Jeno, which should have been easy since there was a movie playing on a huge screen in front of him, though he found it to be an immense struggle.

“What’s up?” Jeno whispered. “Is something wrong?”

Renjun could feel the gentle ghost of his breath on his ear. His heart was no longer thumping, but crashing about, flopping like a fish out of water.

“Shut up,” he hissed, hoping Jeno couldn’t see his blush in the dark. “No talking during movies.”

Jeno obliged with a shrug.

Renjun was on edge until the movie finished. As the lights came up, he texted his uncle that they were ready to be picked up, and slid out of their row as quickly as possible, Jeno trailing behind as they emerged into the sunlight outside.

“So what did you think of the movie?” Jeno asked, leaning against the wall as they waited.

“It was alright,” Renjun answered, though really, he’d barely paid attention to it. It was so unlike him, he thought; usually, when there was a movie on, it was impossible to draw him away from it. Maybe he was simply out of his groove. Maybe it had just been a boring movie, not worth the attention anyway.

Or maybe, he’d been too distracted by the thought that Jeno was only inches away, the shape of his body drawn starkly in the bright light of the movie projector.

“Just alright?” Jeno said teasingly. “Not the response I expected from Director Boy. Was it too lowbrow for your tastes?”

“Maybe,” Renjun responded. He looked at Jeno properly now, letting his eyes slink up his bare arms, across his broadening shoulders, over his Adam’s apple, finally to his face. “I think my tastes are maturing.”

\---

Renjun and Jeno strolled through the cool reprieve of shade provided by the forest. It turned out that what lay in the opposite direction to the downtown area was simply more road, and along that road the trees thickened into a pretty mix of oak and pine. Jeno had told Renjun that he’d been playing in those woods his whole life, proven by the worn trails that wove in and out of the patched sunlight. Renjun was thankful again that his uncle lived just far enough away from Seoul to allow that kind of closeness to nature. It was completely different from back home, where Renjun lived in the Jilin City suburbs. There, he was lucky to have immediate access to stores, transport, and other conveniences, but not this kind of untouched beauty.

“We made it so the trail loops back around about a half-mile out,” Jeno was explaining, pointing further down the path with one hand, and in his other holding a popsicle. It was a terribly hot day (Renjun had known it the moment he woke up, sheets stuck to him with sweat, the sun that came through his bedroom window so intense he felt he was frying), so Jeno’s mother had given them popsicles from the freezer to keep them cool as they walked. Renjun licked at his own, which had already half-melted, dripping cherry-red onto his hand. “If you walk far enough past the trail, you’ll hit the creek.”

“The creek?” Renjun asked.

“Yeah. It’s just deep enough to swim in. Shoot, we should’ve brought swimsuits. Maybe tomorrow.” Jeno stepped up onto a rock at the trail’s side, walking with his arms out to maintain his balance, one stone to another.

Renjun liked how it looked, the way Jeno’s posture broadened him, forming a wrinkle in the fabric of his white tee where his shoulder blades parted. Renjun was always attracted to little details, and he found that Jeno was made of them, and Renjun discovered a new one every time he looked at him -- the angular jut of the bone in his thumb, the pronounced bow of his top lip, the slight raise in the bridge of his nose. Renjun took out his camcorder as he’d done a hundred other times that summer, zooming in at the back of Jeno’s neck, where he could see the bump of his vertebrae at its base.

Jeno continued to walk forward, but turned his head so he could glance back at Renjun. “You’re doing that again?”

“I told you,” Renjuns said. “It’s for a project. I’ve got to record everything.”

“I’ve never even seen any of your videos,” Jeno complained. He stopped when he stood upon the tallest rock of the outcropping, and dropped down to sit on its edge, legs dangling above the exposed dirt of the trail. He stuck his hand out, expectant. “Let me look at them.”

Renjun hopped up onto the rock beside Jeno, scooting close so their knees touched, and passed the camcorder into Jeno’s hands. “The menu button is here,” he said between bites of his popsicle, pointing over Jeno’s shoulder. “And you use the arrow buttons --”

“I got it, I got it.” Jeno tapped through the video thumbnails, slowly at first, then more quickly, passing like he was searching for something specific and couldn’t find it. He was quiet for a long time, aside from the clicking of the camcorder buttons. Renjun watched the screen reflecting in Jeno’s eyes, a bright white square against the dark of his irises.

“These are all videos of me,” Jeno murmured.

“What? No they aren’t.” Renjun looked back at the menu, at the rows of thumbnails. Jeno was, in fact, in nearly all of them, the only obvious exceptions being the ones he’d taken at Hanyang. Renjun felt a twinge in his stomach at the realization, embarrassment, as if Jeno was reading his diary. He became aware, too, of the fact that despite the intense summer heat, he had leaned in so that he and Jeno were touching, bodies warm against each other. Self-conscious, he scooted an inch back, while Jeno selected a thumbnail and let a video play. It was one of him from Renjun’s uncle’s house, when they’d been clearing out boxes, shot without Jeno knowing from behind the closet doorway. The next video was another taken in secret, where Jeno had begun reading something aloud to him from a dusty history textbook unburied from the bottom of his uncle’s closet, and Renjun had zoomed in close at Jeno’s lips while he spoke. Then Jeno had noticed the camera on him and offered a peace sign, though it was only half in-frame.

Jeno watched the footage of himself with an unreadable expression. His hands were cradling the camcorder almost reverently, with more caution than Renjun had expected to see in them; but the next second, he was shoving it back into Renjun’s arms, and saying, “You should diversify your portfolio.”

“You’re the only person I ever see this summer,” Renjun muttered, defensive. He shoved his camcorder back into his pocket. “I don’t have many options.”

“Hmm.” Jeno glanced up at the sky. It was completely cloudless, and so blue it was electric. Cicadas buzzed, and in combination with the heat, it was like sitting inside a telephone wire, all drone and zing and intensity. The stone beneath them was half in the shadow of the trees, cool against their thighs, but searing hot where it was exposed to the sun. Renjun held his popsicle out into the light, not caring as it kept melting, observing how the little crystals of ice glimmered, vibrant from the food dye, but also partially translucent, like a thin slice of a ruby beneath a microscope.

“Renjun,” Jeno said. “Have you ever kissed anybody?”

Renjun froze. “No. Why?”

“I don’t know. I was just asking.” Nonchalantly, Jeno swallowed the last bite of his own popsicle, then folded the plastic leftovers in his fist. “You’ve really never kissed anyone?”

Renjun did not like this line of questioning. If he’d felt like his diary was being read before, he felt it doubly so now. “No. Have _you_ ever kissed someone?”

“No.”

“Then we’re even,” Renjun said dismissively. _So even Mr. Popular hasn’t had his first kiss._ They were only fifteen -- still plenty of time left for it to happen, so he tried not to overthink it. Instead, he sucked at the end of his wrapper, drinking the now completely liquid remainder of his popsicle.

Jeno broke into a sudden laugh and said, “Your mouth is all red, you know.”

“What?”

“From your popsicle. It dyed you red. You’ve got it on your tongue and your lips. And the corners of your mouth, too.”

Renjun lifted a hand to try and wipe it away, then glanced down at his knuckles to see if the pigment had rubbed off at all. “Did I get it?” he asked Jeno, except when he looked back up, Jeno was close to him, _really_ close, and then his mouth was on Renjun’s mouth. Jeno’s lips were soft in their inexperience, but moving with curiosity at the newness of the sensation, trying to feel out what a kiss should be. Renjun did not know what he had expected it to feel like; he’d known from TV and movies that kisses were supposed to feel nice, but he didn’t realize it felt nice _everywhere_ , not just at the lips, but like a pleasant static from head to toe. He kissed Jeno back eagerly, perhaps _too_ eagerly, as their teeth bumped with a stinging click, but neither of them stopped to acknowledge it. Renjun hadn’t known that he’d wanted Jeno’s kisses until just then, and now, he wasn’t sure he could have enough. He wanted Jeno’s lips and hands and _heat_ \-- it turned out, Jeno was a million times hotter than summer, enough to make Renjun melt.

They stopped kissing to breathe.

“Your face is red, now, too,” Jeno said. “It matches your mouth.”

Renjun could not think of anything to say in response. He pressed a hand to his cheek, feeling the burn of his blush, brain completely fried.

\---

Like Jeno had said, they were going to the creek the next day in an effort to fight the persistent heatwave. That morning, Renjun grabbed a towel from his uncle’s bathroom cabinet, and the very thought of seeing Jeno again in just a few minutes was enough to make his heart beat blisteringly fast, so fast it made it hard to breathe, and he bent over and buried his face in the towel, trying to calm himself.

_Jeno likes me._

He could not stop thinking about it. It had followed him around all day yesterday, even after he and Jeno had walked home, hands shyly linked, and said goodbye at the yard fence. He’d thought about it while lying in bed, knowing he would never fall asleep because _he was going to see Jeno again tomorrow and Jeno. Liked. Him._

“What are you up to today?” Renjun’s uncle asked him, as Renjun passed through the kitchen with his towel on his arm, doing his best not to look as giddy as he felt.

“Nothing,” he responded lightly.

“Is that so?” His uncle took a sip from his coffee mug, smirking.

“I’m going to go swimming at the creek.”

“With Jeno?”

Renjun hurriedly slipped his sandals on and ran out the door. When it clicked shut, it cut off the end of his uncle’s knowing laugh.

Jeno was waiting for him at the gate, watching Renjun approach with a closed-lip smile, his hand a visor over his eyes to block the sun, and Renjun had to resist the urge to dive over the fence and plant a kiss right on his mouth.

“Ready?” Jeno asked him.

“Yeah.”

Jeno got off the gate and opened it for Renjun, and the two of them walked to the road, following it to the left towards the forest.

Renjun kept looking at Jeno’s hand, hanging at his side, and wondering if he was supposed to take it. He was too nervous to. He thought if he did, he might have a heart attack and collapse there on the side of the road and Jeno would have to carry his limp body all the way back to his uncle’s house and deliver the bad news, and that would be a terribly embarrassing way to die.

 _Play it cool,_ he told himself. _You do not want to scare your first boyfriend away._

Thankfully, Jeno rescued him from the awkward silence. “Where’s your swimsuit?”

Renjun looked down at himself. He was wearing his usual outfit, an old t-shirt and cargo shorts. “I didn’t bring a swimsuit with me to Korea. I’ll just swim in this.”

Jeno shrugged. “You could have asked to borrow something.”

“It wouldn’t have fit me.”

“You could always skinny dip.”

Renjun punched Jeno in the arm, face luminescent pink.

When they arrived at the creek, Renjun removed his sandals, walked down to the water, and stuck his toes in. It was not very cold, but Renjun preferred it that way, and it would still be a relief from the bright sun. “It’s nice and warm --” he began, but stopped when he turned and saw that Jeno was pulling his shirt off over his head, stripping down to only his trunks. For some reason Renjun had not considered the fact that Jeno would not be swimming fully clothed, and now he had to force himself not to stare.

Jeno, oblivious, joined him at the water’s edge and stepped in. “It _is_ nice,” he said, wading out until the water was around his waist, fingers trailing across the surface and making it ripple in his wake. Renjun followed him, recoiling when the water hit his knees, but continuing anyway. He liked the way the creek smelled, like mud and leaves and algae. The water was a little greenish, but not murky, and the sunlight streamed through it so that he was able to see the bottom. He watched the minnows dart around, avoiding his footsteps, while heavoided sharp twigs and rocks in the riverbed.

“You’re not taking your shirt off?” Jeno observed.

“No thank you.”

“Are you shy?”

“Yes,” Renjun admitted.

“Cute,” Jeno said, and Renjun had half a mind to plunge beneath the water to try and hide the returning blush. “If you come a little further, it’s deep enough to swim.”

“I don’t know how to swim.”

“Really? Do you want me to show you?”

“Okay.”

Jeno came back up into the shallows, taking Renjun’s hands and guiding him to the place where the water rose to their ribs. It was a little humiliating, Renjun thought, for Jeno to teach him to swim as if he were a child. But Jeno did not chide or condescend, and he moved and spoke with the same patience and kindness he always showed to his grandfather. Renjun was comforted by it, and he allowed himself to relax while Jeno helped him onto his back, showing him how easy it was to float.

There were not any underwater kisses, or any of the sort of ridiculous, romantic thing Renjun had seen in movies before; and he might have been disappointed, except he was happy just to be with Jeno, so the imagined kisses that had plagued his mind all morning had dissipated. Maybe that was a good thing. They didn’t have to move fast. Renjun was content for them simply to go where the current took them.

Once they tired of the water, they climbed ashore and laid down on a big, flat rock at the creekside, allowing the sun to dry them off. Renjun shut his eyes, basking in the warmth, completely at peace as he listened to the birds call over his head and the gentle rush of the creek’s current and, even closer, the sound of Jeno’s breathing beside him. Renjun turned his head, watching the rise and fall of Jeno’s bare chest, the way droplets of water clung at his collar bone and throat.

His heartbeat quickened, and he shivered.

“Are you cold?” Jeno asked.

“No. I’m fine.” Renjun shook his head, trying to tear his thoughts away from the pretty glistening of Jeno’s skin. “That was fun. I can swim pretty good now, huh?”

“I mean, you pull off a mean doggy paddle.”

Renjun giggled. “I had a good teacher.”

“You don’t have your camera right now, do you?” Jeno asked.

“No. I wouldn’t bring it to a river. It might get wet.”

Jeno propped himself on an elbow, twisting his lips in a thoughtful, anxious manner. “I want to tell you something.”

 _Something he doesn’t want recorded,_ Renjun thought. “What is it?”

“I told you before that I didn’t take my grandpa out for walks much anymore,” Jeno began quietly. “It’s because my mom doesn’t want me to. When we went that time before, I really shouldn’t have done it. I got in trouble for it once. I’m only supposed to watch him at the house.”

“You got in trouble?” Renjun couldn’t imagine it. Jeno was the perfect son. He took such careful, loving care of his grandfather. It seemed impossible.

Jeno traced the surface of the rock with his index finger, pushing around a few stray grains of sand. “I took him for a walk downtown one time, to the grocery store. And there were these other kids -- they live on the other side of town, past the auto shop… I don’t know them very well, but I see them around sometimes, always riding their bikes in the street and yelling and spitting in the dirt and stuff. Anyway, they were at the store too, and they got behind us in line at the checkout. I was helping my grandpa count out his money, because we like to let him do little things like that, because it’s supposed to help his memory. And those kids started acting awful, laughing at him and harassing us for taking too long and saying stuff like how he ought to be in a home if he can’t do things by himself…” Jeno bit down hard on his bottom lip, a touch of fire igniting in his eyes. “So I turned around and I punched one of them right in the face. Except that wasn’t satisfying enough, so I kept pummeling him and Mr. Choi had to tear me off of him. I don’t know if I would have stopped otherwise. That’s how angry I was. And then Mr. Choi called my mom and told her she had to come pick me and Grandpa up. She was shocked… I’d never done anything like that before, never gotten in a fight or anything. She told me that from then on, I couldn’t take him out anymore. But it wasn’t really because of me. She didn’t want us to run into those kids again, or any person who might be mean to him like that.” He paused. “I don’t think Mr. Choi was happy to see me back in his store the other week. Not after all that. Especially ‘cause I’d knocked over a display and broke some bottles when I pummeled that kid. My mom had to pay for them.”

 _Now_ Renjun could imagine it. It was just like Jeno, to fight back against someone who disrespected his family. To protect the people he cared about. “You don’t regret it, do you?” Renjun observed. “You’re glad you did it.”

“Yeah,” Jeno said. “I wasn’t gonna let someone talk to him like that. I hate people who aren’t patient with others -- who can’t even have a little bit of empathy. It makes me sick.”

Renjun wondered if the reason Jeno didn’t like to talk to his friends about his grandfather, or have them over to his house, was because he was afraid they might act like the kids at the store. Maybe they would laugh, too. Renjun recalled the sheepish, standoffish way Jeno had acted when he’d had come to his house that time he’d been watching his grandfather, like he expected Renjun might be one of those nasty kids, too. He didn’t want Jeno to think that about him. He wanted Jeno to know he could be patient and empathetic and trustworthy.

“I think you did the right thing,” Renjun said. “Or -- I don’t know if it was the _right_ thing. But I understand why you did it.” He found Jeno’s still absentmindedly busy hand, and held it, despite his nerves. “You’re a good grandson.”

Jeno smiled, like a terrible weight had been lifted off of him, and lay back down on his back, content in the warmth of the sun.

\---

When they got back to Jeno’s house, it was late afternoon, the sunlight taking on a golden sheen. Nobody was home, as Jeno’s mother had taken his grandfather to a doctor’s appointment, so they thought they would take the opportunity to raid the kitchen for snacks, as all the swimming had made them famished. However, Jeno stopped Renjun at the door, and said, “We’ve got to wash our feet off before we go in, or my mom will kill us.”

“Oh.” Renjun looked down. Perhaps unwisely, they’d walked back carrying their shoes, and now their feet were covered in dirt and grass, picked up while still wet and now sticking to their heels. Jeno began to uncoil the hose from its hook on the house’s back wall, letting its green, snake-like rubber hit the grass with a smack. He twisted the knob, and water began to stream from the nozzle, weak at first and then collecting pressure until it became strong enough to properly clean them off.

Jeno washed his own feet first, bent over and propping himself up with one hand braced on the wall. Renjun was entranced by the way Jeno’s lashes fanned over his cheeks, long and dark and pretty, and if he wasn’t so distracted by them he might have noticed the devious smirk that was rising on his lips. Quicker than Renjun could react, Jeno whipped the house up, spraying Renjun’s legs and middle.

“Jeno --” Renjun cried, backing up and nearly slipping on the damp grass. “We just spent ages getting dry!”

Jeno clutched his stomach, laughing so hard it seemed to hurt him. “You should have seen your face -- I’m sorry, you were wide open, I couldn’t resist --”

“ _Jeno,_ ” Renjun said again. “Stop laughing, you jerk.”

The other boy did his best to comply, though a little hiccupy giggle still made its way out before he offered, “Here, you can get me now. If that’ll make you feel better.” He held the hose out.

Renjun snatched it and turned the nozzle on Jeno, wetting his shirt. Then, relishing his revenge, he jerked the stream up higher, splashing Jeno in the chin.

“Hey -- not my face --”

“You started it.”

“Give it back to me if you can’t be responsible --”

Now Renjun was laughing, running in the other direction as Jeno gave chase, clutching the hose to his chest and hunching to hide it. Jeno wrapped his arms around Renjun, trying to pry it from his fingers, and suddenly the water was going everywhere, soaking their clothes, removing the dirt and grass from their feet but making them even more unsuited to going inside. They stumbled into the wall, Renjun back first, and he had a moment’s comprehension of how close to each other they were again before Jeno stopped trying for the hose and took Renjun’s face in his hands instead, kissing him, damp forehead to damp forehead. The hose fell out of Renjun’s grasp, hitting the ground; and, using his last bit of sense before Jeno stole it away from him, Renjun reached along the wall to find the water knob and shut it off before they flooded the backyard.

It started the same as it had the day before, gentle and exploratory. Renjun’s hands settled on Jeno’s chest, and he loved how solid he felt, how strong, like he was the only thing holding Renjun together. He pressed his hands harder, trying to feel for Jeno’s heartbeat to see if it was thumping as rapidly as his own.

Then the kisses were not gentle, but certain and demanding of more. Jeno’s tongue glided over Renjun’s bottom lip. Renjun melted, almost literally this time, sliding down the wall until he was sitting on the ground, and Jeno went with him, kneeling between Renjun’s legs.

Jeno kissed him again, and Renjun felt like summer would last forever.

\---

Renjun returned to his uncle’s house with darkly flushed cheeks and the secret of what they’d done stashed under his tongue. Just as he’d been when he’d left that morning, he was giddy, steps light and skitting across the hardwood of the living room floor, almost a dance.

“You’re back,” his uncle said.

Renjun startled, having not noticed him there. He was sitting in his armchair, reading a book under the subtle golden light of his brass-necked, compact desk light.

“Yeah,” Renjun said.

His uncle adjusted his glasses on his nose and squinted at him. “Your face is red, Renjun. Do you feel okay?”

“Oh -- yeah. I’m fine.”

“You look feverish.”

“It’s just ‘cause it’s hot out.”

His uncle shrugged, and flipped a page in his book. “By the way -- could you remind me what day it is that you’re leaving? It’s next week, right?”

Renjun’s body lost its electricity. The heat left his face, and it paled.

“Yeah,” he said. “On Friday.”

It was Sunday now. Five days left.

Renjun had become oblivious to the passage of time. Had he really been there for nearly a whole month? Had he been so caught up in Jeno, that he hadn’t noticed their time ticking away, even though that should have been the most critical, obvious thing?

The switch from elation to misery was so fast, it was like a suckerpunch.

“Well, we’ll need to make sure you have everything packed before then,” his uncle said, having turned attention back to his book. “And you should call your parents to check in and make sure they’ll be there to pick you up from the airport.”

“Yeah.”

“Perfect. I’m going to start dinner in a minute. How does hotpot sound? I picked up some beef at the market today.”

“Sounds great,” Renjun said, knowing it did not matter what they ate, because he would not be able to stomach much of it. He would not even be able to taste it -- his heartbreak would strip it of its flavor.

That night, as he lay in bed, he wondered if he was overreacting. He and Jeno had kissed for the first time just yesterday. They’d only just figured out that they wanted something more than friendship. Why was it so devastating to lose something he’d had for such a short time?

Renjun wondered if he was in love with Jeno. He’d never been in love before -- he’d had crushes, but they had been fleeting. He might see a boy, and wonder vaguely what kissing them might be like, or what it would feel like to have their hand at the small of his back or the nape of his neck. But those boys would never return his wondering, of course. In fact, most of them were boys who would eventually notice him only to poke fun at him. They were the boys who made nasty remarks in the hall, who called him a space case and a nerd and a weirdo.

Jeno was not one of those boys. And maybe Renjun was still high on the sensation of his touch, but he thought it could be love.

He recalled what Jeno told him before he’d left that afternoon, after they’d come to their senses and cleaned up. He’d given Renjun one last kiss, smiled like he could not hold it back, and said, “I can’t wait to see you again tomorrow.”

They were running out of tomorrows. Renjun would make sure to treat them preciously while he still could.

\---

Jeno had helped his father to put up a hammock between two trees along the edge of their backyard. A big hammock, big enough for two people, but Renjun had not wanted to get on, because once he’d seen a video on the internet of a girl who got in a hammock and then the whole thing had flipped upside down and she’d fallen onto the ground with a comical smack, and Renjun thought that was the exact kind of thing that might happen to him, given his history of unintentional injury. He was prone to walking directly into telephone poles and street signs, and one time he’d been crossing the street and a cat had run out in front of him on the crosswalk and he’d tripped right over it, face planting in the middle of traffic and taking so long to pull himself together (half due to injury, half due to embarrassment) that people in cars had begun to honk their horns at him. It was the fourth most mortifying experience of his life.

Jeno had to coax him into it by holding the hammock steady for him while he clamored in. Then, once Renjun was situated, Jeno hoisted himself up, rocking the hammock and making Renjun momentarily panic, gripping the woven hammock strings for dear life. However, Jeno settled in beside him without incident, their bodies pressed together, and took Renjun’s hand.

"It's shitty that this summer has to end," Jeno said.

Renjun didn't say anything. He held his camcorder up to film their linked hands, zooming way in to capture the intertwining of their fingers; then, he angled it towards the evening sky, which was vibrant pink-orange between the blackened silhouettes of the trees.

Jeno laughed. "That camera is practically glued to your palm."

"It's important."

"Why?"

Renjun had never described it to someone before. It made him nervous for some reason, like he was making himself vulnerable. "I just see things sometimes, and I think, 'If I don't get it on video, then it's gone forever.' Like there are all these little details in life that can't be reproduced once they're gone. Videos make them last forever. It makes it so you can look at them over and over, and that makes them realer, somehow."

Jeno cocked a brow at Renjun’s logic. "If you don't record it, does that mean it wasn't real? That it didn’t really happen?"

"Not exactly. You have the memory of it to prove it. But memories aren't as permanent. They're unreliable."

Jeno stared at the red light of Renjun's camcorder, the light that meant it was recording. "That reminds me of something I read once. When a woman gives birth, it hurts so badly that no one should ever want to do it again. But because human memory is so faulty, they forget exactly how painful it was, and with time, they start to remember it differently. So that way, they aren't afraid of having another child later on. Because their memory rewrote itself into believing that childbirth isn't as painful as it really is.”

Renjun leaned his head against Jeno's shoulder. "That's weird. I never heard that before."

"Scientists think it's because if we really remembered that kind of pain, it would be traumatizing. So our memory is faulty by design. It's a coping mechanism. That way we can just keep on going -- so the pain doesn't follow us around forever. That's what I read, at least." Jeno was quiet, murmuring, breath soft on Renjun's hair. "So maybe recording everything isn't a good thing. Sometimes, you're _supposed_ to misremember things. It makes life easier."

"Are you thinking about your grandfather?" Renjun asked.

Jeno gave a wobbling sigh. "I just… I look at him, and I think that losing your memory like that is the scariest thing I can imagine. So I try and convince myself that there must be something positive about it. As if God intended it that way. Like, when he had his stroke -- that must have been so painful. But he can't even remember it happening now. So, in that sense, his forgetting is good for him."

Renjun shook his head. “You don’t have to try and find some little bit of good in it, Jeno. It’s an awful thing to have to go through. You can be upset about it.” He knew that Jeno was always trying to pretend it didn’t hurt. Around his family and his friends. Even around Renjun himself. That was the thing about having so many responsibilities at such a young age -- it made Jeno feel like he had to to bear them without complaining, or else everyone would only see him as a child. Renjun wondered why being seen as a child was such a bad thing.

And he wondered what Jeno would do after that week, once they were separated. Maybe he would never tell anyone how he felt about it again. Maybe he would shut himself off and simply smile. It was a foolproof plan -- it was impossible to look at Jeno’s smile, at the crinkling of his eyes and the fullness of his grin, and believe anything was hidden behind it.

“You know, you telling me all that,” Renjun said, “only makes me like filming things more. I think it might be good to preserve painful memories sometimes.” He flipped his camcorder around so that it faced down at the two of them. He turned the screen, too, to make sure he was getting both of them in frame -- their heads, shoulders, the ends of their hair where it caught in the rugged rope of the hammock. “ _This_ is going to be a painful memory, once I leave. But I want to keep it.”

Neither of them smiled for the camera. Renjun liked it better that way. It meant they weren't faking it, pretending to be something they weren't. They were just themselves.

“Maybe I can come back next summer,” Renjun said.

“We’re in high school now. We’re going to be too busy to spend summers away.”

Renjun bit his lip. “But -- I don’t really care about school, Jeno. I’ll come back, and we can spend next summer together again.”

Jeno looked away from the camera lens. “Maybe you will. But maybe you won’t. We can’t plan that far ahead.”

“Are you breaking up with me?” Renjun turned his head, trying to read the emotion in Jeno’s profile.

“I just think… when you go back to China, you’ll probably meet someone there that you like. And I’ll stay here, and find someone that _I_ like. And it would be silly for us to stay together when we’re hundreds of miles away, when we could each date someone close to us instead. It’s not really a relationship if we can’t even touch each other, is it?” Jeno remained straight-faced, but Renjun could see that each word he said had to be forced out. He didn’t mean any of it. He was trying to be sensible, but sensibleness and love did not mix well. “Maybe we’re just naive, because we were each other’s first loves.”

“You really think that?” Renjun asked.

“I don’t know what I think,” Jeno admitted.

“Well, what _I_ think --” Renjun curled closer at Jeno’s side, making himself impossible to ignore. “-- is that we shouldn’t break up. I’ve seen long distance relationships all the time in movies. They always pan out. They reunite at the end, and they run to each other, and then they live happily ever after.”

“You have seen a movie for every possible occasion,” Jeno remarked.

“I have. But remember?” Renjun tapped the side of his camcorder. “Movies are realer than real life. They always tell the truth.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It doesn’t have to make sense.”

Jeno sighed, but finally, he looked at Renjun. “You really want to stay together?”

“I do,” Renjun leaned in close, so their noses touched. “We can even give it a trial run. And if we decide we hate it, we can stop. But I think we should try it.”

“Okay,” Jeno said.

Renjun turned his camcorder off and dropped it into his lap, giving them a moment of privacy as Jeno closed the gap.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/playing_prince) | [cc](https://curiouscat.me/playing_prince)


	2. spring semester

When Renjun walked into his dorm room at Hanyang, the window was open. It blew in a gentle breeze that smelled like freshly mowed grass and budding flowers; and lying on top of his desk were a few petals fallen from the cherry blossom tree outside. They skittered along the wood before landing on the recently-vacuumed blue-gray of the carpet.

“So this is it,” he said, breathless. He wheeled his suitcase into the center of the room and looked around. It was bigger than he’d imagined, big enough for two lofted beds, two desks, two dressers. Their window faced out towards the center of the quad, where there was a little fountain spurting water. A few kids sat on its edge, chatting, and further away on the lawn, some others were kicking a ball around.

Renjun’s mother pushed in the door behind him, lugging his duffel bag. “Looks like your roommate has already settled in, huh?”

There was a clear dividing line between Renjun’s side of the room and his roommate’s, designated by the plastering of posters on the wall at its exact halfway point. They all seemed to be posters from bands Renjun had never heard of -- probably underground or indie acts -- and most of them included some combination of the grim reaper, a knight on horseback with a bloodied sword, or Satan himself, grinning as he devoured a mortal. The bedsheets had been lazily thrown on, not even properly tucked in, and Renjun suspected that that was as close to fully-made the bed would be for the rest of the school year. There was also a black curtain, pinned beneath the mattress, which turned the under-the-loft area into a spooky cove of some sort; perhaps a place for lighting ceremonial candles and holding a seance. Stacked in the corner were many cases of Red Bull and, perched precariously on top, an opened bag of pistachios which had spilled over onto the floor.

Renjun’s mother gave that side of the room a wary glance and asked, “What was your roommate’s name, again?”

Renjun looked down at his phone, where he’d kept his building name and room number recorded on a notepad app. “Wong Yukhei, it says.” He’d originally been excited at the prospect of his roommate being another Chinese boy, because he thought they’d be fast friends. Now, he wasn’t so sure.

“Yikes,” Renjun’s father said as he entered. He’d been slow coming up the stairs, carrying a big box containing Renjun’s blu-ray player and discs. “I’d watch to make sure your roommate doesn’t murder you in your sleep or something.”

“Noted.” Renjun pushed his suitcase into the corner, then took the box from his dad’s arms and set it on top of his desk. His room was in the international students’ dorm, and he might have just lived with his uncle, except all international students were required to live on-campus. Part of him was happy about it, anyway -- he wanted college to be like how he always saw it in the movies. The dorm life, the full campus experience.

They’d mailed Renjun’s belongings ahead of time, then flew to Korea on a Monday, taking an early flight so they would have time to bring the boxes up to the room and unpack them that very day. Classes did not start for another week, but he was required to attend freshman orientation in the meantime, which meant his parents would be flying back tomorrow to leave him to it.

They began to unpack, filling in the empty space, making it Renjun’s. He lined his DVDs up along the top of his dresser, while his mother watched, lips pressed together, trying to hide her disapproval.

He’d had to beg for weeks before his parents had finally agreed to let him pursue a major in film. When he’d first pitched the idea at dinner, it had been met with blank stares and hanging jaws, and then laughter, as if he’d been joking. They’d realized soon enough that it was not a joke, because he’d then spent every waking moment talking about it -- texting his mother articles about Hanyang’s film program alum, asking his father if he really wanted to live in a world without movies because that was exactly what was going to happen if all uptight parents denied their children’s dreams, and shoving his demo reel in their faces at every opportunity.

Finally, they’d broken down, but only when he’d agreed to minor in political science.

He had not been excited at the prospect, but it was better than nothing.

For the rest of his high school career, he’d studied harder than ever before. He was not a boy who had much interest in grades or school, but if it meant he could get into Hanyang, it would be worth it. His mother had been so shocked when he’d asked to enroll in cram school that she had placed a hand to his forehead and asked if he was sick.

He’d even given up his weekend trips to the movies to study more. It had been a terrible sacrifice, but it was all worth it the day he’d finally received his acceptance letter.

“Well,” his father said now, once he finished screwing the bulb into Renjun’s desk lamp. “What do you think about dinner? We can eat here on campus, if you want.”

“But I’m gonna be stuck eating campus food for the rest of the semester,” Renjun whined. “We should go get fancy food.”

“Sure, if you’re paying,” his father responded, smirking.

Renjun groaned and pulled on his coat.

\---

His parents left the next morning. His mother was crying, but Renjun managed to hold it together. For one thing, he would be seeing them again for his summer break, and for another thing, he was too excited about Hanyang to even have home on his mind.

Freshman orientation began at 11, with an address from the president. As Renjun entered the auditorium, he noticed that all the other students were wearing the lanyards they’d received on move-in day, color-coded by their colleges. Renjun tugged his own from his pocket -- purple, with “College of Art and Physical Education” spelled in white down its strap -- and placed it over his neck. The rows of chairs were marked by orientation group. He found his own, labeled “Group M,” and slipped into an open seat. Then he sat as tall as he could, craning his head around to try and find other kids who had matching lanyards. Maybe they were film students, too.

The boy sitting beside him said, “Hi. What’s your name?”

“Renjun.”

“What major are you?”

“Film.”

The boy wrinkled his nose. “Really?”

Renjun grasped his lanyard defensively, pouting. “Yeah. Why, what’s yours?”

The other boy twisted his red lanyard around so Renjun could read the words _School of Business._ “I’m a business major. I want to start my own business in --”

“Sounds boring.”

The other boy huffed and turned the other way.

The rest of Renjun’s orientation group filed into their row. Not one of them had a purple lanyard.

Renjun sank down in his chair, scowling.

The president’s address lasted ages. At some point, Renjun fell asleep, head tilted back, audibly snoring. The boy beside him jabbed him in the ribs to wake him, and Renjun nearly jolted out of his chair.

“I’m awake,” he hissed.

A girl sitting in the row in front of them gave him a sour look.

Once the droning speech was finally over, their orientation leader approached, carrying a sign with the letter M in huge block font. “Hey guys! I’m your OL. My name is Eunjin, and I’m a fourth-year industrial engineering major.” She was a short girl with a skinny ponytail and a smile that took up half her face. “Everyone follow me, and we’ll go grab some lunch and do some icebreakers!”

Renjun could already feel the excruciating pain of said icebreakers. He dragged his feet behind the other freshmen.

Eunjin led them to a dining hall in the next building over, where they got food in little takeout boxes and, instead of sitting at the tables, went outside to eat on the lawn. The other orientation groups seemed to have had the same idea, because the grass was littered with people, sitting in circles and chatting, or standing and playing games. One group had a frisbee, and were tossing it around, a blue disc against a blue sky.

“Let’s all go around and introduce ourselves,” Eunjin said, giant smile still plastered on her face. She seemed to have about eighty billion teeth. “Names, majors, and one fun fact!”

Renjun hated being asked for fun facts. He shoved his slice of pizza into his mouth and hoped that maybe if they were chewing when they got to him, they would just skip to the next person.

It did not pan out. Eventually, they came to him, and he was forced to say, “My name is Huang Renjun. I’m a film major. My fun fact is… well, I guess I like movies.”

“That’s not a fun fact,” the business major boy objected. “We coulda guessed that already.”

“Fine. Then… I’m from China. Does that count?”

“That’s not really a fun fact either.”

“I think it’s fun!” Eunjin offered, voice rising to a helium-high pitch. “You’re the only international student in our group! That’s super fun!”

Renjun shrunk back from her intense cheerfulness, and responded with a quiet, “Haha, yeah, I guess so.”

After introductions, they did an icebreaker game which involved an intricate lap-patting and clapping pattern and a lot of rhyming. Renjun felt like a kindergartener. He sincerely hoped the other orientation groups were not watching and laughing behind them.

Finally, Eunjin left them in peace to finish eating. The others in his group immediately struck up a conversation about some Korean TV show he had never seen. He did not try to talk to them. Instead, he glumly peeled a piece of pepperoni off his pizza and ate it.

 _So much for my perfect college experience,_ he thought. _I should have known better. I’m no good at making friends._ He wished there was just one person there he knew, someone he could talk to. He wished his parents were still there. Or even --

The thought was cut off as the frisbee struck him in the back of the head. He dropped the remaining quarter of his pizza slice face down onto the grass.

“For fuck’s sake,” he snapped.

“I’m so sorry, I should have been more careful -- are you okay?”

Renjun whipped around to give the frisbee tosser a piece of his mind, and froze.

It was Jeno.

If Renjun took the Jeno he’d known three years ago and grew him up a little, this was exactly what he might have imagined: taller, broader, his features more refined. But it was still undeniably him, with his dark, straight brows and strong nose and perfect lips. If that wasn’t proof enough, there was his mole, right where Renjun remembered it beneath his right eye.

He was so shocked, he forgot where he was and what had just happened. He stared up at Jeno, breathless.

“Are you okay?” Jeno said again.

“Jeno,” Renjun whispered.

Jeno tilted his head in confusion. “Sorry -- do I know you?”

“What do you mean?” Renjun laughed, thinking he must be joking. “It’s me!”

The question mark did not leave Jeno’s eyes. He glanced around the lawn, as if wondering if anyone else was witnessing this interaction to confirm it was really happening.

_He doesn’t remember me._

_Lee Jeno doesn’t remember me._

_He completely forgot about us._

Renjun reached up and snatched Jeno’s sleeve. “It’s me. It’s Renjun.” He tried not to sound too hurt as he added, “Don’t you remember?”

Finally, a look of recognition passed over Jeno’s face. “Oh -- oh yeah. Renjun. I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Of course I remember you.”

Renjun smiled, relieved but with a residual anxiousness. “What are you doing here? You ended up going to Hanyang?”

Jeno drew his arm away from Renjun’s grasp, and picked up the frisbee where it lay on the ground. “Yeah. It’s kind of a long story.” He took a step back, and pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “I’ve gotta go back to my orientation group. Maybe I’ll see you around sometime and we can catch up.” Then he ran back in the other direction, where the other students waited for him.

Renjun’s heartbeat faltered.

_Maybe I’ll see you around sometime._

Those weren’t words of someone who meant it. They were avoidant. They were an empty promise, because Jeno was not really interested in seeing him again.

Renjun suddenly, terribly wanted to go home.

\---

When Renjun returned to his dorm room that night, his roommate still was nowhere to be seen. It was better that way anyway, he thought. He was not really in the mood to meet anyone else.

He thought about going and getting dinner somewhere, but he didn’t want to leave the building again. Then he thought about heating up some instant ramen in the microwave, but the microwave was in the kitchen down the hall, and he didn’t want to risk running into another kid and having to make small talk with them. So he grabbed a granola bar from a box he’d brought with him, and ate it at his desk as he checked his email to see if either of his two friends from back home had sent him anything. They had not.

He climbed up into his bed at eight o’clock, pulled his blankets up tight around himself, and watched cartoons on his phone until he fell asleep.

He was awoken at two in the morning by the slamming of the dorm room’s door.

“Who’s there?” he asked, bolting upright. He watched as a dark figure stumbled across the room to the wastebasket in the corner, then promptly began retching into it.

Renjun scrambled out of bed so fast he nearly fell down his ladder.

He switched on his desk lamp, half-lighting the room. There was a very tall boy sitting on the floor, hugging the wastebasket to his chest, face buried in it. Renjun tapped him on the shoulder.

“Hey -- are you Yukhei?”

The boy grunted into the basket.

Renjun inched closer, then reeled back at the scent of booze mixed with bile. “ _Hey,_ ” he said. “Let’s -- let’s go to the bathroom, okay?”

The boy lifted his face. He had huge, out-of-focus eyes and a dribble of spit hanging from his full lips. “Why? I wanna stay here.”

“Because I don’t want you to get puke on our carpet.” Renjun wrenched the wastebasket away, and cringed at the sloshing sound it made. For the time being, he replaced it in the corner, then began helping Yukhei to his feet.

“Can’t move,” Yukhei moaned. “Too drunk.”

“Too bad. I am not sleeping in a vomit-scented room.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you mean, what do I mean?”

Yukhei leaned way too close to Renjun’s face and said, “I thought you were my guardian angel.”

Renjun’s face twisted in disgust at the smell of Yukhei’s breath. “I am your roommate.”

“Oh. That’s lame.”

“I’ll show you lame,” Renjun muttered as he turned the bathroom knob with his elbow and carried Yukhei inside.

Under the too-bright lights, Renjun could finally get a good look at him. He was tall (though he’d figured that out already, by the way he was about Renjun’s height when hunched over and clutching his stomach), tanned, and was probably quite handsome beneath all the… stuff. Stuff as in the eyeliner that had been smeared down his cheeks by vomit-induced eye watering, the gel in his hair that had been flattened into a lopsided mess, and the leather jacket with chains that jangled every time he took a drunken, stumbling step.

Renjun kicked open an empty stall and lowered Yukhei beside it, who bent over and immediately began round two of spluttering and spilling over. Renjun turned away, trying not to breathe through his nose, watching the door in case someone else entered.

“How’d you manage to get this fucked up?” he asked.

Yukhei pulled his face from the toilet bowl and slurred, “Me and my band… playing at this club… girl started talking to me after… loves musicians, she said... super hot, awesome rack… had one too many cocktails while trying to get up the nerve to ask her back to her place --”

“That’s enough details, thank you,” Renjun said. The last thing he wanted to hear about was his hammered roommate’s failed attempts at getting laid. “You know, it was kind of not cool of you to come back into our room drunk off your ass in the middle of the night. I was trying to sleep. We have orientation in the morning, you know.”

“You sound like my mom.”

“I pity your mom.”

Yukhei laughed, which turned into another garbled roar. Renjun cringed at the sound of liquid hitting liquid.

“Now that you’ve found the proper receptacle,” he said, “I’m going back to bed.”

Yukhei flashed him a crooked thumbs up, and heaved again.

Renjun wished that just one part of his college experience could go according to plan.

\---

“What do you mean, you’re thinking of coming home?”

Renjun glanced around at the other students walking to class on the gray pavement path, and said very quietly and close to the phone, so as not to attract their attention, “I don’t know. Maybe college just isn’t for me. Maybe I made a mistake.”

“Renjun,” his mother said, voice dripping with disappointment. “You haven’t even had your first class yet. Orientation is a pain, but it’ll get better from here on out.”

“I know, but…” He pressed his earbuds further into his ears, trying to leech any comfort he could from the sound of his mother’s voice. “Maybe I should have just gone to school back home. It’s hard to be so far away.”

“ _Sweetie._ Don’t give up now. Let’s wait and see how you feel after your first week of classes. Then we can talk about it again. Okay?”

He sighed. “I guess.”

“And don’t be so mopey. Brighten up a little -- that’s the only way to make friends!”

She was using her sixth grade teacher voice. The voice she used when he was acting like a middle schooler. He blushed, and was glad she could not see it.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m almost to class, so I’ll let you go.”

“Alright. I love you.”

“Love you, too.”

He hung up and tugged his earbuds out as he pushed open the glass door to the technical institute. Just as he had a few years prior on his campus tour, he turned away from the first floor classrooms and descended the basement staircase to the School of Theatre and Film. It was the first day of the semester proper, and he had his first class, Film Production I, at eight AM. He could only imagine how excited he would be for it if he hadn’t had such a dreadful orientation week. He never managed to make friends with anyone in his group, so every time they met was painful and awkward, leaving him on the fringes of the conversation. Yukhei was MIA half the time, and when he _was_ back at the dorm, he was either strolling in drunk during the night or stomping around in his combat boots and playing too-loud metal from his stereo. Then, just last night, someone on their floor had put a bag of popcorn in the microwave for thirty minutes rather than three minutes and set the fire alarm off at midnight. Its blaring woke him, and then he’d had to go outside in his pajamas for the headcount while they waited for the fire department to arrive. It was a week of new low after new low.

And then there was Jeno.

Renjun had not seen him since he’d hit him in the head with the frisbee. This was almost worse than running into him again, because he began to wonder if he might have imagined the whole thing. Why would Jeno be at Hanyang, anyway? Surely he’d have gotten into one of those prestigious universities he’d talked about before. But then again, Renjun did not know what Jeno had been up to for a long time. Maybe his dream had changed.

They’d last spoken about eight months after Renjun returned to China. Prior, they’d been able to keep in touch reasonably often, and though it was not ideal, they were happy enough, Renjun had thought. Mostly, they’d emailed back and forth, to avoid long-distance costs, and because Renjun was often unable to keep a low word count -- it was easier for him to type out a very long email filled with digressions and photolinks than to labor over his phone keyboard. However, they’d also agreed to bite the long-distance bullet and talk over phone or video call at least once every two weeks. Renjun had always been so giddy for those, bouncing in place on his bed as he’d waited for the connection to come through. Even if they couldn’t touch or kiss, hearing Jeno’s voice and seeing his face was enough to make their efforts worth it.

A few months in, the calls began to grow further and further apart. It was no longer every two weeks, but once a month. It wasn’t for lack of trying -- they’d both been simply too busy with school and other obligations to call with such frequency. Renjun had told himself not to worry. Things wouldn’t be so difficult forever. They would find a way.

The emails became less and less consistent. It went from days to weeks between responses. Renjun had checked his inbox every single day, every hour, waiting to hear back.

_Jeno!!_

_Guess what!!!!!! I went to the pool today!! I know that’s not that exciting, but I haven’t gone swimming since we went to the creek this summer. I got to put all the skills you taught me to use. I’ve even gotten good at going underwater without pinching my nose shut!! After, me and my friends went to get ice cream at a new place that just opened nearby. They had Coca-Cola flavored ice cream -- Coca-Cola!!!!!! Isn’t that weird? It didn’t taste very good, but it was neat anyway. I took a lot of pictures there so you could see. It would have been more fun if you could have actually been there._

_Anyways, what are you up to? Is school still going okay? How’s your grandpa? Has Joeun gotten any acceptance letters yet? I want to know everything that’s happened._

_I miss you so much. I hope I get to see you again this summer._

_Renjun_

A week and half later, he received his response.

_Hey Renjun,_

_Sorry it took me so long to get back to you. I’m really busy right now with school and soccer and stuff at home. I wish I could be there with you, too._

_Joeun was accepted to Korea University. I think she’s going to commit to it. My parents and I are so happy for her. I hope I can get in there someday, too. But that’ll mean I’ll have to study even harder._

_Maybe we can do a video call this weekend. I’ll let you know._

_Jeno_

Jeno had not let him know. Renjun had responded right away, and had been met by another two weeks of silence. It should have been clear then that things would not last. But Renjun had refused to let it go so easily, and even Jeno, on the rare occasions he’d written back, had never outright said he was not interested in staying together. Perhaps he’d been too afraid to end it, too afraid to admit that they’d been in over their heads.

Eventually, the responses died. Renjun had still written. He’d still tried to call, only to be met by the answering machine. His heart had broken, but he’d persisted.

_Jeno,_

_It’s been a few weeks since I’ve heard from you, but I hope everything is OK. If something happened, you can always talk to me about it._

_I talked to my mom again about majoring in film in college, and she said maybe!! That’s definitely better than a straight-up no, right? I think I can wear her down eventually. We’ll see what happens!!!_

_I still miss you!!!!!!!_

_Renjun_

Another, months later, with the hopes that Jeno was at least still reading them, even if he was not writing back:

_Jeno,_

_It’s me again!! You’re probably getting sick of all my emails. I stopped calling you because I don’t want to bug you but I hope you don’t mind my emails too much._

_I talked to my uncle and it turns out I can’t come back to Korea this summer. He’s going on a trip for work to Shanghai, so I wouldn’t have anyone to stay with. When I found out, I cried for an hour. That’s embarrassing to admit, but I don’t mind admitting embarrassing things to you cuz I know you won’t make fun of me. If you’re even reading this, that is._

_I wonder a lot about what you’re doing these days. Maybe you found another boyfriend or something back home. I wouldn’t be mad at you if you did, but I wish you would tell me._

_I still miss you. I’ll end every email reminding you that I miss you._

_Renjun_

Finally, after one year of talking to nobody, Renjun gave up. It didn’t hurt as badly as he’d expected, probably because, somewhere deep down, he’d known it was over a long time ago. He would think about Jeno all the time still, but then it would lessen, to where he would only think about him once a day, and then only once in a while, when he saw something in particular that reminded him of his summer at fifteen years old. Like the dark silhouette of a telephone pole against a blue sky, or a grandfather and grandson together in public, walking at an easy, no-rush pace.

He sent one final email a few months before he started college, the first in a long time.

_Jeno,_

_I was accepted into Hanyang’s film program, which means I’ll be going to school in Seoul starting in the spring. I know you aren’t reading this. But I thought I’d tell you anyway._

_Maybe we’ll run into each other sometime._

_I. Miss. You._

_Renjun_

Judging by the look on Jeno’s face when he’d seen Renjun at orientation, he had not received the news. In fact, he hadn’t seemed to remember that Renjun existed at all.

Renjun could not get over it. The questioning in Jeno’s eyes, the way that, once he _had_ recognized him, he’d simply brushed him off as if they hadn’t spent a summer together. As if they hadn’t kissed in the hammock until they’d fallen asleep together, legs tangled, Renjun’s ear on Jeno’s heart.

He was angry, and he was sad. But he could no longer be either, because he was entering his first class, and his mother was right. He could not make friends like that. He had to be positive.

The classroom was past the basement’s main lobby where the equipment desk sat, around the corner and down a hallway. When he arrived, he was one of the first students there -- he’d left extra early that morning to make sure he had time to find the right room. He took a seat at one of the empty tables, and nervously tapped his fingers against its surface.

The rest of the chairs filled up. It seemed that most of them had already found friends within the major; perhaps they’d met people at orientation, or joined an online group Renjun had not known about. It made him feel even more distant than before. It didn’t help that the girl who sat beside him only sat there because her friends had sat at the table before them, and she wanted to stick close. She kept tapping one of the other girls on the shoulder and talking to her, and Renjun desperately wanted her to talk to him instead, even just a hello. She did not.

Finally, the professor arrived. She was a frizzy-haired woman, perhaps fifty, wearing dangly earrings and dress pants. She went up to the front desk, opened her laptop on it, and squinted at the screen.

“Good morning, everyone,” she began. The students quieted to listen. “Welcome to Film Production I. Since it’s a Monday and an 8 AM, this must be all your guys’ first class of the semester. Correct?”

There was a soft, consenting hum around the room. Not due to a lack of enthusiasm, Renjun thought, but a bit of nervousness at their first college class.

The professor smiled, as if she’d expected it. “Well, I’ll try not to bore you. You’ll be having lots of boring classes your first week, so I thought I’d start right off with something fun. First, we’ll go through attendance -- get the lame part out of the way. Then I’ll pass out the syllabus, which you can read on your own. That way, we have plenty of time to start our first project.”

The class’s response was more pronounced, but more divided this time -- half groans, half excited murmurs. Renjun aligned with the latter. He’d been itching to do something hands-on, if only to distract from everything else that was going wrong in his life.

They went through attendance as promised, and then the professor stepped out into the hallway. When she came back through, wheeled behind her was a cart stacked high with cases. She slung one off from the top and clicked its latches open on her desk. Inside was a large, black, old-fashioned camera.

“This,” she began, “is a Bolex. I’m not sure how familiar you are with them, but these are film cameras that were developed during the first half of the 20th century. You’re probably thinking that it would be pointless to record on one of these now, since they aren’t often used anymore in professional filmmaking. But I like to do our first projects on Bolex, because I think it gives you a greater appreciation for digital tech. Not to mention the physicality of it -- a Bolex makes you work for your image.”

She hefted the camera up under the lights. It looked heavy, awkwardly tall, covered from top to bottom in little silver dials and switches. Three big lenses were stuck on its front, and prominent at its side was a crank.

“A Bolex needs to be wound up before you can use it. You also need to insert the film by hand, which is what I’m going to show you all how to do today.”

It was a complicated process. Their three hour class was used to its fullest, beginning with a rundown of all the buttons and levers -- how to adjust the shutter speed and exposure, how to lock the crank so it didn’t smack you in the face -- and then the film loading demonstration. She did it first right there in the classroom, which made it look deceptively easy. In reality, they would have to load their camera in the dark to keep the film from developing prematurely.

“It seems complicated,” she said, “but you’ll all get the hang of it.”

One by one, they entered the dark closet to give it a try. Renjun did not realize exactly how screwed he was to be sightless. It was really, truly pitch black in there, and even once he thought he’d found the right tab or spool, he would lose it again. And then he began to forget everything the professor had just told him -- did the film loop this way, or that way? Did it go under or over the little metal arch? He was completely hopeless at the whole thing.

“I suggest you do a little more practice on your own,” the professor told him lightly, trying not to make him feel bad.

After, there was a lighting demonstration, where they went outside and learned how to measure the sunlight and adjust their exposures accordingly. The whole tutorial had been such a whirlwind that Renjun almost felt like it had _decreased_ his filmmaking know-how. The Bolex had chipped a hundred cells off his brain.

Hurriedly, right as their time ran out, they were assigned their partners. Renjun’s was a boy with shaggy hair and a giant hoodie who smelled like a hangover. Renjun figured he and Yukhei would get along splendidly, but was not sure that he was going to be a great project partner.

But despite the confusion and the mess and the room full of strangers, Renjun felt hopeful. This was where he had wanted to be, and now he was reminded of why. They were going to make something. They were going to make something from nothing and stitch it together and turn it into gold.

He left the classroom hefting his Bolex case in his hand, eager to put it to use.

\---

He had his second class that evening. It was a film history class, which thrilled him almost more than his production class, because it meant he was going to be able to _watch_ movies, not just make them. And there was little he loved more than watching movies.

The class was a bit larger this time, a full lecture rather than a close knit lab. It reminded him of the room Heejung had shown him, the seats raised in tiers like an auditorium. He sat down behind a boy wearing headphones who bobbed his head to the music, which was playing so loudly Renjun could hear it. Renjun glanced lower, to where the boy’s backpack rested on the floor beside his chair. It was covered in pins, as if it were swarmed by beetles with massive, glossy shells. Each pin was different, showing cartoon characters and TV show logos and, hooked at the bottom of the front pocket, a little rainbow flag.

Renjun did a double take when he spotted it.

Impulsively, he leaned forward over his desk and tapped the boy on his shoulder. The boy swiveled, pulling off his headphones. He was wide-eyed and round-faced, like a baby deer.

“Hi,” he said. “Can I help you?”

Renjun swallowed, wondering how exactly to say it. “I, uh… I like your pin.”

The boy laughed. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

“Oh. The -- the rainbow one.”

The boy realized what Renjun was saying, and what he was was trying to say between the lines, and his face showed the briefest surprise before he said, “Thanks. What’s your name?”

“Renjun.”

“I’m Donghyuck.” He smiled. “Is this your first class?”

“No. I had my production workshop this morning.”

“Oh, really? I have mine tomorrow.” Donghyuck paused, realizing the silliness of their inter-row conversation, and patted the seat beside him. “Come sit here.”

Renjun was so delighted he nearly skipped his way down.

\---

Once class let out, he and Donghyuck ate a late dinner at one of the dining halls. They fell naturally into friendship with the help of Donghyuck’s humor, which helped to squash any anxiety still squirming in Renjun’s chest. He made it easy, effortless, and Renjun was so very thankful he’d spotted that rainbow pin to begin with. It had opened a door for him.

He learned that Donghyuck wanted to pursue sound editing in film. He was also planning on auditioning for Hanyang’s men’s acapella group that week, because he’d been singing ever since he was little, beginning with his church’s choir. He had a boyfriend, Jaemin, who he’d been dating since high school, and they’d planned to both attend Hanyang so they could stay close during college. Jaemin was majoring in education, with the goal of becoming an elementary school teacher.

“What about you?” Donghyuck asked. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

Renjun couldn’t hide his slouching shoulders. “Not really.”

“Not really,” Donghyuck repeated. “That’s a funny answer.”

“I mean, I don’t. I guess I was hoping I would meet someone here, but...”

Donghyuck seemed to sense Renjun’s weary-heartedness, and quickly took a different tone. “Boyfriends aren’t that important, really. Especially in our freshman year. We’ve got all kinds of other stuff to worry about. So don’t get all hung up about dating.”

“I know,” Renjun said.

His love life had not been completely dead since the summer he’d met Jeno -- he sort of had something going with a kid from his neighborhood, who had insisted frequently, and often without prompting, that he was not interested in boys and instead wanted to score a hot girlfriend before they graduated high school. Then one day, when they had been at Renjun’s house to work on a school project together, Renjun had mentioned in passing that he thought he might be gay. And then, all of a sudden, the other boy had asked Renjun to give him a blowjob, and Renjun had been frankly too horny to say no, so he’d done it right there in the living room beside their half-finished poster about pond succession, all the while praying his mother did not return home from the mall right then because she might have fainted and dropped all her shopping bags on the floor at the sight of it. After that, they’d proceeded to fool around for the next month or so, until Renjun had finally ended it, because he’d decided he wasn’t interested in boys who were not devoted and straight-forward and truthful with themselves. He wanted the real thing. He wanted a proper romance.

When Renjun had broken it off with him, the other boy had only said, “Fine. It’s not like I’m gay anyway. I only hung out with you to give me something to do.” Renjun had rolled his eyes in response -- the boy had always been way too excited at the prospect of seeing Renjun without his clothes for it to be an even remotely believable lie.

“You know,” Donghyuck said, drawing his backpack up onto the seat beside him. He tapped a finger against the rainbow pin. “I’m glad I put this on here. I was kind of nervous to, at first. I didn’t really know what kind of reaction it would get.” He smiled to himself. “But I’ve met a few people already because of it. Not just you -- during orientation, a girl in my group saw it and told me she liked it. It turned out she was gay, and a film major too, and now we’re friends.”

Renjun wondered if he could have gotten up the guts to put that flag on his backpack. He certainly would not have in high school -- he’d already been made fun of enough for other reasons.

“I think that’s my favorite thing about college so far,” Donghyuck continued. “I think everyone is so much more open to being themselves. And it’s easier to find other people like you. So I can wear this --” He tapped again at his pin. “-- without feeling like an outcast.”

“You know,” Renjun said. “You wearing that pin made _me_ feel a little less like an outcast, too.”

Donghyuck grinned. “I’ll get you one of your own then, someday. We’ll be a matching set.”

\---

The sun was unusually hot for a mid-Spring day, which might have been pleasant if not for the fact that Renjun had to lug his Bolex and tripod all the way across campus. Their assignment was simply to practice composing around movement, which meant he had to find a nice, active spot and shoot. It wasn’t difficult, considering it was noon on a weekday -- students swarmed the pathways, going in and out of doors, chatting in the grass. The difficult part was shooting them without looking suspicious. Every time they saw that big shiny lens, they veered out of the way like it was the barrel of a gun.

It might have been a little easier if he was not alone. But he’d texted his partner that morning, and the conversation that had ensued had had Renjun swearing at his phone.

_hey!! are we still good to shoot at 12? i was thinking we could do it near that big weird-shaped building next to the college of humanities_

_sorry man im not feeling well_

_but we’re running out of time?? we have to consider how long it’ll take to develop the film, too_

_i know i said i was sorry. i really can’t make it. i have the stomach flu so_

_what am i supposed to do???? this is kind of really inconvenient_

_idk man. u can just shoot it urself if its that important_

It wasn’t just being alone. It was not having a second pair of eyes to check his work. He’d done his best to load the film in the dark, though he was not confident he’d done it correctly. Then he’d checked the lighting with the lightmeter, except he couldn’t remember the right exposure setting, so he’d combed through his notebook because he _knew_ he’d written it down somewhere, but it seemed to have disappeared. On top of that, he only knew the functions of about half the buttons, and he was afraid there might be a secret self-destruct switch on it somewhere that he might bump with his elbow and blow the whole thing up.

And so he was very delicate when, after an hour of shooting, he removed the Bolex from its tripod and began to reload it in its case. He thought he might have gotten at least a little usable footage, though it was hard to tell, since he couldn’t play it back and check. He lifted the case in one hand, and with the other, he propped the folded tripod over his shoulder, trying to keep a straight face so no one noticed his straining, trembling arms beneath the weight.

Apparently, his act was not convincing, because a voice from behind asked, “Do you need help with that?”

“I’m fine, thanks --”

He whipped around, and nearly hit Jeno in the head with the tripod legs.

“Oh,” he said. “It’s you.”

Jeno held out a hand. “Let me take something.”

He looked good. He’d looked good at orientation, too, but today he was wearing a black t-shirt that showed the outline of his chest beneath, and tight-fitting blue jeans with rips in the knees, and his hair was laying in such a way that it exposed one dark brow, and he didn’t even have a single zit, and it was _completely fucking unfair_ for him to look that good.

So good, in fact, that Renjun had to remind himself that he was still supposed to be angry at him. He ignored Jeno’s hand, and snapped, “I don’t need your help.”

“Come on. You look like your arms are about to fall off.”

“That’s fine. I wanted them to fall off, anyway.”

Jeno scratched the back of his head, glancing awkwardly around. Renjun could tell that he’d only stopped because he’d really looked like he’d needed the help; his kindness had overcome his desire to avoid Renjun as long as he could.

Stupid, helpful Jeno.

Reluctantly, Renjun handed him the tripod, and began to lead him towards the tech institute.

“What are you doing here, anyway?” Renjun asked. “Weird coincidence that you ran into me. Are you stalking me or something?”

Jeno pointed to the building where Renun had shot at. “That’s the College of Life Sciences. Almost all of my classes are held there. Seems more like you’re stalking me, what with the camera and such.”

Renjun blushed in embarrassment. He was no good at being snarky. It always backfired on him. As he recovered, he attempted to be a little less aggressive. “What major are you?”

“Biology. I’m in the pre-med program.”

“Oh, that’s right. You want to be a pediatrician.”

“Not anymore. I want to be a neurologist.”

Renjun bit his lip. That was one of many things that must have changed in the past few years that he did not know about. It was almost like talking to a stranger. _He’s still Jeno,_ Renjun reminded himself. But this Jeno’s details had all shifted a bit to the left. He’d become more obscure, harder to understand.

“How about you?” Jeno asked. “Judging by the camera, you went through with the film major thing?”

The resentment returned. “Yeah. If you ever read my emails, you would know that.”

Jeno paled, and his footsteps fell back into a guilty shuffle. “I’m sorry, Renjun. I really am.”

“Sure.”

“I mean it. A lot of stuff happened back home after you left. I got so busy, and I was so distracted… I never really meant to ghost you. Honest.”

“When was the last one you sent, Jeno?” Renjun’s grip tightened on his Bolex case. “Like, two years ago? In all that time, you didn’t think to respond to me once?”

“I’m sorry,” Jeno said again. “I know I should have responded, even -- even just to tell you it was over. But time ran away from me.”

Renjun stopped walking and turned to him, suddenly feeling fragile, like his heart was made of paper, crumpled and torn. “But even worse than that… I saw you last week, and you didn’t even remember me. I had to _remind you_ who I was. Did you really think about me so little? Am I just an acquaintance to you now or something?”

Jeno’s mouth hung open for a second, breath caught. “I don’t know what to say.”

“It’s fine. Give me my tripod.”

Jeno didn’t argue. He handed it over, and Renjun went on ahead without him, wishing he’d never allowed his help in the first place.

\---

Renjun stood in the School of Theatre and Film lobby, sipping at his coke in a plastic cup. It was the evening of the mentor-mentee meet and greet. He’d seen a flyer for it earlier that week -- advertised as an event where freshmen could meet the upperclassmen and be matched with a mentor to show them the ropes of the major. When he’d arrived, he’d filled out a name tag and stuck it to the front of his t-shirt, then grabbed a drink and hovered by the sofa. There were other students hanging around, waiting for the event to start, some of whom he recognized from his classes, others he did not recognize but was somewhat intimidated by because they seemed so clearly older than himself, with beards and high heels and the look of men and women who knew how to do their taxes -- the upperclassmen.

He wondered how they looked so grown up only three years ahead of him.

Donghyuck arrived a few minutes later, bounding down the stairs and removing his headphones. “Hey,” he said. “Has it started yet?”

“Nope. You’re just in time, I think.”

Just as he said it, one of the upperclassmen clapped his hands to gather everyone’s attention. “Hey guys!” he shouted. “If you don’t already have a name tag, go fill one out! And help yourself to drinks and snacks. Then, you can start to mingle and talk. If you meet someone you click with, write their name down on your mentor form, and we can officially link you up. Sound good?”

Everyone gave an assenting cheer, and the meet and greet began. Donghyuck hurriedly ran to the folding table to fill out his name tag. Renjun, alone, waited cluelessly. He was not one to approach others; not because he was shy, but because he feared being unwanted. Around him, the others had already begun to mix, bowing and smiling.

He tapped his toe uncertaintly on the tile floor.

“Hey, you’re a freshman, right?”

He hadn’t really expected someone to approach him, so he nearly dropped his half-empty coke cup in alarm. Before him was a boy with sharp, upturned eyes and a huge smile full of toothpaste commercial-esque white teeth.

“Oh --” Renjun wiped his hand on his jeans, to ensure it was not clammy, and offered it in a shake. “Yeah. My name is Renjun.”

“Hi, Renjun. I’m Dongyoung. I’m a senior.”

“It’s nice to meet you.” The nervousness dissipated. Dongyoung’s demeanor was calming and kind, and his forwardness made Renjun feel less pressure to be outgoing.

“It’s kind of loud here. Do you wanna go talk in the lab?”

“Okay!” Renjun hoped he didn’t sound too desperate for the attention. Still, he smiled to himself and followed Dongyoung down the hall.

The post-production lab was close by, an exceptionally cold room filled with computer workspaces. In the far back of it was a whiteboard, covered in student doodles including a duck in overalls and shirtless Batman, and a few couches for students to lounge on as they took breaks. Renjun had been in there briefly once, just to check it out, but since he hadn’t needed to edit anything yet, he’d had no reason to hang around. He got the impression that the upperclassmen practically lived in the lab, working day and night on their senior projects.

Dongyoung and Renjun sat on the couches. Someone had left a blanket on one of them (it was _really fucking cold_ in there), and Dongyoung held it out to Renjun, saying, “So, what do you think of the major so far? I know it’s only week two, but…”

“It’s --” Renjun wrapped the blanket around his shoulders. “It’s alright. I guess it’s a little different than I expected. Our first project is the Bolex thing --”

“The Bolex!” Dongyoung exclaimed, grinning. “Oh yeah, I remember that. Every freshman has to do it. It’s a huge pain in the ass. Luckily, you’ll never have to touch a Bolex again once it’s over, if that’s any help.”

“Yeah… I did my shoot the other day, but I’m worried I screwed it up.”

“Really? Do you want help with it?”

Renjun’s cheeks reddened, and he waved his hands in embarassed dismissal. “That’s okay, you don’t have to do that -- it’s too late anyway, so --”

“Well, if you want help next time around, you can just ask. Any senior would be willing to help you, I’m sure. When you have time, you should stop by this lab and talk to some of us. At the very least, we can give you some advice.”

 _It’s like its own little community,_ Renjun thought. Perhaps he would take Dongyoung up on that. It might be a good way to make some new friends.

“By the way,” Dongyoung said. “Do you know what track you’re interested in?”

The major split into six tracks: directing, writing, producing, cinematography, editing, and sound editing. By the end of their first semester, every student was required to choose one, as their curriculum would be built around their area of focus.

“I’m not totally sure,” Renjun responded, “but I think I want to go into directing.”

“Really?” Dongyoung’s face lit up with excitement. “I’m a directing tracker! I’m actually working on my senior film right now as the director.”

Dongyoung was exactly where Renjun wanted to be. He was already making his own films, assembling his own team. The first couple weeks of school had not exactly made Renjun high on the whole filmmaking thing, but the thought that he might someday be able to do what Dongyoung was made him a bit more optimistic.

“That’s so cool,” he said, envious. “I wish I was doing something like that.”

“Well, you’ll get to work on your first short film during your second semester. But if you wanted to get started sooner, I could always find a role for you on my set. The sooner you start to get experience, the better.”

Renjun’s jaw dropped. “You would really let me do that?”

“Of course.” Dongyoung laughed at Renjun’s huge, disbelieving eyes. “We like to get freshmen to work on the smaller parts, anyway. It wouldn’t be anything super exciting -- just doing odd jobs or whatever little thing the grip team asks you to do -- but it would give you an idea of what working on a set is like. Shooting starts in a few weeks. Are you interested?”

“Of course I am,” Renjun said, the words tumbling out on top of each other, too giddy to show restraint.

“Cool.” Dongyoung reached around and pulled his mentee form from his back pocket. “Should we fill these out?”

“You want to be my mentor?”

“Totally, I do.”

Renjun wondered if perhaps every mishap so far that semester had been a good thing, if it meant all his luck had been saved for that moment.

\---

Renjun sat in his uncle’s office. It was small and his desk took up about half the space, piled high with papers and the shelves above it crowded with old paperbacks, spines broken and faded white. He even had one of those mini zen gardens with the little rake on top of his filing cabinet, though Renjun thought it could use a fresh pass, since its sandy waves had crumbled into indistinct, messy lines.

His uncle had invited him for lunch, and packed one for him as well. Renjun was getting sick of ramen and leftovers, so it was nice to have something homecooked for a change. And it was nice for a conversation to be comfortable, familiar, without the hurdles of a new friendship.

“So,” his uncle said. “Are you liking Hanyang so far?”

“It’s nice,” Renjun answered, preferring to keep it vague. “My classes seem cool.”

“Have you run into Jeno yet?”

Renjun stopped mid-chew, rice between his teeth. “That’s a very particular question of you to ask.”

“Well, I know he ended up enrolling here. His parents told me.”

“Hmm.” Renjun swallowed, eyeing his uncle warily. “Yeah. I’ve run into him.”

“And?”

“Pass.”

“What do you mean, pass? You can’t _pass._ ”

“I can, too.” Renjun shoveled more food into his mouth just to prove his disinterest in discussing it further. “Let’s talk about you instead.”

“Well,” his uncle said, taking the bait. “I’ve been seeing someone lately.”

“No kidding.” Renjun frankly could not believe that his uncle’s love life was more active than his own. It was like the universe was rubbing it in his face. “I guess I forgot that old people date, too.”

“I’m not that old,” his uncle said, with quiet indignance.

“Well, maybe you ought to let me meet her soon.” Renjun folded his bitterness as small as he could, making it ignorable. He figured he ought to have a little positivity for the one constant in his life -- his family. “Maybe we could go get dinner sometime.”

“Yeah. That sounds nice.” His uncle leaned back in his chair, dabbing his kerchief at the corner of his mouth. “You’re always welcome to come and stay for a weekend, you know. Get away from all the fuss of school.”

Renjun considered it. The thought of returning to that house was both inviting and intimidating. He would have liked to revisit it, enjoy the peace and quiet outside the city, retrace the paths of his youth. But it would also mean confronting those memories. Maybe they wouldn’t be as magical. Maybe that summer three years ago would lose its sentimental glow. He feared that more than anything. It was one thing to lose his affection for the Jeno of the present, but another thing entirely to lose his affection for the Jeno of his past -- the Jeno he’d loved.

He defaulted to the non-committal. “Maybe. I’m pretty busy right now, but I’ll let you know.”

“Sure,” his uncle said. “Any time you decide you’re ready.”

\---

At the end of week five, Renjun attended his first college party. He was invited by Donghyuck, who had been invited by Jaemin, who had been invited by his roommate, who had been invited by one of the upperclassmen in his major. Renjun was not entirely sure that it was good manners to attend a party when he didn’t even know who was throwing it, but Donghyuck assured him that that was how parties typically worked.

“It’s BYOB,” Donghyuck had added, “but since we can’t buy booze anyway, Jaemin did us a solid and is bringing enough beer for the three of us. He knows a guy.”

“He knows a beer dealer?” Renjun had asked skeptically.

“His roommate is twenty. Jaemin slipped him some cash.”

“How clever.”

Renjun had tasted alcohol only once before. It was when his parents had thrown him a small party after his acceptance to Hanyang, inviting his cousins and aunts and uncles over for dinner and drinks. His parents had just popped open a bottle of rosé for the two of them, but then his father had slid him a glass across the table.

“Are you sure that’s such a good idea?” his mother had asked.

“It’ll be fine,” his father had assured her. “It’s better for him to have his first drink at home where we can watch him than with some irresponsible kids. And it’s _his_ party. Let him have a little fun.”

Renjun had eagerly taken it and sipped. The taste of the alcohol had made him shudder, and he could feel its sharpness as it slid down his throat. One glass was enough to get him tipsy, laughing too loudly and dizzy in his seat. Then he’d asked for another, which pushed him over the proverbial drunken edge, and he’d ended up spilling it in his lap, fingers too fuzzy to retain their grip. When he’d found out it was the last of the wine, he’d begun to cry at the injustice, which his father had thought was so funny that he’d filmed it on his phone and shoved it in Renjun’s sobered face the following morning. He’d watched while blushing, and swore to himself he would never drink in front of his parents again.

Thankfully, there were no parents at college parties. Plus, he’d already had his practice run -- he was certain that he would be better at holding his liquor this time around.

They arrived at 10. The party-thrower lived in one of Hanyang’s off-campus houses. It had looked pretty big on the outside, at the very least far bigger than Renjun’s dorm room. When they entered, however, it seemed suddenly small, because there were so many people that it was a struggle to squeeze down the hall to the living room. Couches and chairs were overfilled, with partygoers wedging in between each other and perching on the arms of furniture. The lights were dim everywhere but the kitchen, where six-packs of beer and liquor bottles glimmered in a line across the counter. A little bit of decoration had been attempted, with golden Christmas lights and a Hanyang University banner hung in the balusters of the stairs to the second floor. Renjun kicked off his sneakers next to the other fifty pairs which had made a minefield next to the door.

“Hey.” Jaemin slipped into the entrance way and pulled Donghyuck in to give him a kiss on the cheek.

“Looks like we’re the last ones here,” Donghyuck observed. “I didn’t realize there would be so many people.”

“I think the word-of-mouth invitations got a little out of hand.” He raised his hands, holding a beer bottle in each. “For each of you.”

Renjun took his and sniffed at the open neck suspiciously. He’d never had beer before. He watched as Donghyuck took a sip of his own without hesitation, and did the same.

“Tastes like piss,” he said, coughing.

“Think so?” Donghyuck asked. “Is it at least a pleasant sort of piss?”

“Never say that again.”

Jaemin led them through into the living room and introduced them to his roommate and a couple of his friends. Renjun, only half-paying attention, continued to down his beer, and though he didn’t care for the taste of it, he at least wanted a buzz.

Beside him, Jaemin had somehow secured an empty couch cushion, and Donghyuck was sitting in his lap. At the coffee table, a bunch of kids were playing a poker-ish card game Renjun did not recognize, and cheering or moaning with each finished hand. Jaemin must have won, because Donghyuck screamed and smooched him. Renjun realized suddenly that he was hovering there and not really talking to anyone, which was not how he’d wanted his first party to go. This was a friends-making opportunity. Maybe even a potential love interest-making opportunity, if he could be especially charming. Quickly, he slipped away from the couch, and made his way to the quieter kitchen.

A reasonably cute boy was pouring a bag of chips into a big bowl. Renjun sidled up beside him, leaning his elbows on the counter.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hey.”

“Have you ever been to one of these things before?”

“A party, you mean?” The boy grinned. “Yeah. Why, are you a freshman?”

“Is it that obvious?”

He laughed. “Yeah, it kinda --”

Renjun did not hear the second half of the sentence, because he had a new vantage point now from where he stood in the kitchen and, peering over the dividing half-wall between it and the living room, he saw Jeno in the far corner, beer in his hand, talking to a girl with long black hair all the way down to her butt.

Renjun’s grip slipped on his own bottle, and he spilled it onto the countertop.

“Whoa,” the boy said, grabbing a paper towel off the roll and handing it over. “Careful. Are you good?”

“I’m fine,” Renjun murmured, wiping up his mess. His gaze kept flickering back up, until finally Jeno seemed to finally notice he was being watched, and met Renjun’s eyes across the room. They both looked away from each other.

Renjun hurdled back into the living room and crouched at the arm of the couch beside Donghyuck, who was now draped pietà-style over Jaemin’s lap. “Donghyuck,” he whispered.

“What’s up?”

“My ex is here. Help me.”

Donghyuck jolted upright and accidentally elbowed Jaemin in the stomach.

“Oof,” Jaemin puffed.

Donghyuck ignored him and hissed, “What do you mean, _your ex_? You never said anything about an ex.”

“Well, I’ve got one, and he’s here.”

“Which one is he?”

Renjun pointed as inconspicuously as he could. “Over there. In the blue shirt.”

“Shit, he’s hot. Nice work. Wait -- nevermind.” Donghyuck rose from Jaemin’s lap and took Renjun’s hand. “Come on. We’ll find a way to have some fun. Distract you a little.”

“Where are you going?” Jaemin asked.

“Renjun’s ex is here,” Donghyuck explained. “He needs to be protected from all potential and related dangers. Pretty sure that’s part of the Bro-Code.”

“I’m quite sure it isn’t.”

“It is now. I’ll be back later, babe.” Donghyuck pushed Renjun gently towards the dining nook and pulled out a chair for him, one that faced away from the living room to make sure he wouldn’t be stuck staring at Jeno the whole night.

“Sorry,” Renjun said.

“Don’t be sorry. This is what friends are for -- ex protection squad.” Donghyuck was looking over Renjun’s shoulder, still eyeing Jeno. “How come you never told me your ex went here? I’m guessing you must have dated before school started, right?”

Renjun nodded. “High school. And we never really broke up, so… I guess I never really thought of him as an ex. Not till now.”

“Never broke up, huh? Fizzled out?”

“You could call it that.” Renjun took a miserable sip from his beer, and found it was empty.

As if on cue, a girl in a tube top approached the table from the kitchen, and asked, “Do you guys want shots? We’re pouring some right now.”

Renjun and Donghyuck looked at each other.

“That’s definitely one way to forget about your ex,” Donghyuck said, cocking a mischievous brow.

Renjun grinned.

\---

For a while, things were great.

Renjun had downed his vodka shot with only a tiny splutter, shocked at the burn but unwilling to let it win. Then he and Donghyuck had grabbed more beers, and someone across the room had turned on music -- some EDM with a pounding, room-filling bass -- and the two of them had stumbled into the living room and started dancing, their tipsiness drowning out any embarrassment they might have felt. Others joined in, making the carpet a bonafide dance floor. Renjun did not think about Jeno, even though he’d known he was still in that house somewhere. He’d been too wrapped up in Donghyuck’s completely ridiculous bouncing to the beat, arms flapping like a bird. Jaemin had joined them at some point and lifted Renjun on his back, and Renjun had laughed so hard he was almost crying.

More shots were poured in the kitchen.

They took them, despite their better judgement.

Renjun had a passing realization that he was drunk when the room began to tilt. _So this is what it’s like,_ he thought, clinging to his last bit of self-awareness. The wine had not gotten him quite like this. This was a proper drunkness, the kind that put a filter over everything, at once pleasant and disorienting and almost otherworldly.

“I’m drunk,” he told Donghyuck.

“Me too,” Donghyuck responded, his head balanced on Jaemin’s shoulder. “You feel okay?”

“Yeah. I feel great, actually.” It was the best he’d felt in ages. He _had_ forgotten about Jeno, and about his stupid production assignment. Forgetfulness could be a blissful thing, he thought.

The forgetfulness faded when Donghyuck whispered, “He’s watching you, you know.”

Renjun peered out of the corner of his eye. Jeno was, in fact, watching him from the side of the room. His lips quirked at Renjun’s dancing.

“What do you think it means?” Renjun whispered back.

“Maybe he still thinks you’re hot. Or he hates you. Or both.”

“He’s got a lot of nerve, showing up to the same party as me.”

“Damn straight,” Donghyuck responded, functioning on the same drunken, illogical wavelength.

“I bet he knew I was gonna be here, and he showed up just to spite me.”

“What an asshole.”

“Should I go over and say something to him?”

“Hell yeah!”

Renjun set his drink on the table and rolled up his sleeves as if readying for a fistfight.

“Wait,” Donghyuck giggled. “Renjun, I was only kidding --”

Renjun ignored him and stomped over to Jeno, who had resumed talking with a few friends. Renjun tugged hard on his arm.

“Hey --” Jeno turned and saw him. Flatly, he asked, “What can I do for you, Renjun?”

“Were you watching me dance?”

“It was hard not to. Your dancing is very, uh… _expressive_.”

“Don’t be all snarky,” Renjun said. The room swayed, and he steadied himself with a hand against the wall.

“Are you plastered?” Jeno asked.

“I need to talk to you, for five -- six -- no, seven minutes.” He held up eight fingers.

“Why not make it an even ten?”

This time, the snark did not register. “Even better. Ten minutes.”

Jeno sighed, resigning himself. “Alright. Let’s go somewhere a little quieter.” He wove through the crowd, Renjun trailing behind while clutching the ends of Jeno’s shirt to guide him, and made his way to the stairs. On the second floor, there were a couple of people scattered in the hallway, sitting against the wall and tapping at their phones. Jeno gently pushed open a bedroom door. Inside, it was empty, dark, and quiet, the music from down below nothing more than a soft echo. He flicked on a lamp near the door, and they went inside.

“What did you want, Renjun?” he asked.

Renjun went to sit on the bed, but it was lower than he’d expected, so it was a crash landing, comforter poofing beneath him. “I just want to talk to you.”

“It’s really not good timing. It’s the middle of a party, and --”

“If you don’t talk to me now, I know you never will.” Renjun thumped a hand on the blanket beside himself, indicating that Jeno should sit.

Jeno did. He clasped his hands in his lap, waiting.

“I really missed you,” Renjun said. They were not the words he’d expected to say, but somehow, they’d spilled out, clumsy and honest. “I missed you, and I didn’t understand why you wouldn’t write back. Did you hate me or something? Did you find somebody else?”

Jeno quickly shook his head. “It wasn’t anything like that, Renjun. I told you before, I didn’t really mean to do it. Just… the shit hit the fan after you left. I had to deal with stuff at home.”

“What stuff?”

“My grandfather died,” Jeno said.

It was a slice of clarity in the drunken fuzz. Renjun understood.

“Oh,” he said.

“So I had to deal with that,” Jeno continued. “My mom was a mess -- she’d already lost my grandmother, and then him. I didn’t know how to talk to her about it. I… I don’t know. I guess I just felt so awful after that. Like I was depressed or something, and I couldn’t even focus on my schoolwork. I just laid in my room half the time, thinking.” He paused, eyes dark, as if reliving it for a split second. “I know you only knew him after he was sick, but he was a big part of our family, Renjun. He was really important to me.”

Renjun looked away, ashamed. He should have known that Jeno hadn’t abandoned him over nothing. He should have known something had gone wrong.

“I tried to keep up with your emails, but after awhile, I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t put my heart into it, so it didn’t seem worth it.” His clasped hands squeezed tighter. “I should have broken up with you, but I really thought that I’d come back to my senses someday and we could go back to how things were. But by the time that happened, my grades had gone so far south I had to spend all my freetime studying if I still wanted to get into an S.K.Y.” He let out a breath. “And you see how that went. I applied to all three, and didn’t get into a single one. Hanyang was my safety.”

“I wish you had just told me,” Renjun said. The good feelings had all gone away. He only felt sad and regretful and faintly dizzy.

“I know. But I didn’t really feel like talking to anyone. Maybe that was selfish, but it was how I felt.”

Renjun wondered how much of this he would remember in the morning. He wanted to remember all of it, because for the first time in years, he felt close to Jeno again. He wished he had his camera right then, so he could record it.

“If it makes you feel better,” he said, “I can tell you about what you missed in _my_ life. It was pretty wild.”

Jeno laughed. His shell had cracked, just a little. “Go for it.”

“Well, I went through my teenage rebellious phase. Bleached my hair and then my dad yelled at me ‘cause I stained all our bathroom towels.”

Jeno smirked. “Blonde Renjun, huh? I can’t imagine it.”

“I sent you some photos, but you never got them, I guess. But that’s okay. Also, I joined the tennis team at my school because I thought it might look good on a college application but then in our first practice I stepped on the ball and fell and broke my pinky when I landed on it.” The words gushed out without breaks, mouth moving faster than his brain.

Jeno laughed again, incredulous. Renjun remembered how much he loved Jeno’s laugh, because it used every part of his body, his mouth and his narrowed eyes and his shaking shoulders and his hunched stomach. “Which pinky?” he asked, words laced with a persisting giggle.

“This one,” Renjun said, lifting his right hand. “If you look really close, it’s got kind of a bump where the bone healed.”

Jeno took his hand, examining it under the sideways, golden lamplight. At the touch, Renjun’s heart leapt, the same way it used to three years ago. Had things really changed so much? If Jeno could still make him feel like that -- what would he do if Renjun leaned in and kissed him? It would be so easy to do, because he was so close right now, within reach, their knees nearly touching --

Renjun found Jeno’s lips, somewhat crooked in his aim. He felt Jeno take in a surprised breath through his nose, and there was a second of stillness, but then Jeno kissed him back. His hand, which still held Renjun’s in the air, brought it down to the bed, where he linked their fingers. Renjun recalled their first kiss, in the woods beneath the summer sun, and how tentative and uncertain it had been. Maybe there was another version of themselves who had never worked up the nerve to kiss each other, and that Renjun would not have been heartbroken when he returned to China, but he would not have known his first love yet, either. Presently, Jeno kissed him again, and Renjun decided that it had been a worthwhile tradeoff. He felt so warm, so electric, he knew that if he remembered nothing else from that night, he would remember that sensation, the taste and the feel and the transporting nostalgia of Jeno’s kisses.

Then it stopped, as suddenly as it had started.

“We shouldn’t do this,” Jeno said.

“Why not?”

“Because you’re drunk. It isn’t right for me to do.”

“I’m not _that_ drunk,” Renjun lied. “I want to kiss you.”

Jeno stood, slipping away from Renjun’s touch. “You came here with your friend, right? Let’s go find him.”

Renjun did not protest again. It was a smart choice, because when he tried to get up, he proved Jeno’s point, his balance so muddled that he nearly toppled over.

“Careful,” Jeno murmured. Gently, he took Renjun’s arm, and guided him back down the stairs.

\---

Renjun woke at 10 AM. He quickly regretted waking, because he had a killer headache, akin to a mini jackhammer vibrating against his skull.

“Fuck,” he said.

“You’re awake?”

Renjun, with some difficulty, rose so he could look over the edge of his loft. Yukhei was sitting in his desk chair, eating a pack of strawberry Poptarts.

“Unfortunately.”

“Hungover?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t realize you were the partying type,” Yukhei said, smirking.

“I’m not. That’s your domain.” Another wave of pain hit him, this time with a hint of nausea. “I won’t be making this mistake again.”

“That’s what I said when I had my first hangover. You’ll change your mind.”

Renjun groaned and sunk back down onto his pillow, folding it over his face to cover his eyes. “Don’t you have anything helpful to say?”

He heard Yukhei’s chair squeak as he leaned back in it. “Do you want a Redbull?”

“Is that some kind of joke?”

“No. That’s what I drink when I’m hungover.”

Renjun’s lip curled in disgust. The thought of drinking one drop of Redbull right then made his stomach clench resistantly. “That cannot possibly make you feel better.”

“It works about twenty-five percent of the time.”

“What about your pistacchio stash? Is that hangover food, too?”

“No. That’s fuel. For sex.”

Renjun shifted the pillow so it covered both ears, too.

However, he could still feel his phone vibrating in his pant pocket -- naturally, he’d fallen asleep in his clothes from the night before. He rooted around under the blanket to retrieve it, and answered.

“Hello?”

“Renjun! Are you doing okay?”

He recoiled, and held the phone a few inches away. “Please talk quietly, Donghyuck.”

“Oh. You must be pretty delicate this morning, huh?”

“That’s an understatement. I think I’m dying.”

Donghyuck laughed softly. “You’re not dying. Anyway, I called to see if you were okay. When I dropped you off last night, you insisted on pressing every elevator button on the way up just to ‘see what would happen.’ It was very slow going.”

“I’m so dumb,” Renjun moaned. He could not remember doing that, and was glad of it. He was also glad that Donghyuck had been the only one there to witness it.

“I would have stayed there with you, but your roommate was home, so I figured he would watch out for you okay.” Donghyuck’s voice went even quieter, like he was telling a secret. “So -- you and your ex -- what happened last night?”

_Shit._

“We, uh… we talked.”

“And?”

“And then we kissed,” Renjun said sheepishly.

“You’re shitting me.”

“Alas, I am not. Though I wish I was.” Renjun could not believe he’d done it. He’d been pissed at Jeno just five minutes prior. If he’d been in a better state of mind, it would have never happened.

But then again, Jeno had talked to him. They’d talked, and it had felt natural and honest and just like it used to feel. Maybe that meant something. Maybe Jeno was still interested in him.

Or, maybe, Renjun had just been shitfaced.

“Yikes,” Donghyuck said. “Well -- maybe I’ll leave you alone, then. Sounds like you’ve got some stuff to deal with.”

“Yeah. Thank you.”

“No problem. Give me a call if you need anything.”

Donghyuck hung up, and Renjun held his phone against his chest, feeling a touch of happiness despite the headache. He was glad to have a friend like Donghyuck.

Then, his phone went off again, vibrating through his ribs.

When he checked the screen, he did not recognize the number. He answered anyway.

“Hello?”

“Hey -- Renjun?”

It was Jeno.

“Hey,” Renjun breathed.

“I wanted to make sure you got home okay. Your friend -- Donghyuck, right? He gave me your number.”

“Yeah,” Renjun said. “I’m okay.”

There was a long silence. Awkward, expectant, a placeholder for what neither of them wanted to acknowledge.

“I’m glad,” Jeno finally said. “I was worried about you.”

Renjun smiled.

“I didn’t really have anything to say,” Jeno went on. “I just wanted to check in.”

“Thanks,” Renjun said. “That was nice of you.”

“Okay, then. I’ll see you around.”

It wasn’t like the time he’d said it before, during orientation. This time, it sounded like he meant it. Like he really wanted to see Renjun again.

“Yeah,” Renjun whispered. “I’ll see you.”

The call ended.

The headache and heartache overlapped one another, but Renjun found the latter to be strangely welcome, like an old friend coming back to him.

\---

Renjun sat with his face pressed into the dining hall table, crying.

“It’s gonna be okay,” Donghyuck assured him, patting his hair.

“It’s not,” Renjun sobbed. He’d just gotten back his developed film for his project, and the entire thing had been so overexposed and blown out that he could barely tell what he was looking at. He thought that if he’d just had someone else there to check his work, everything might have gone okay. The next time he saw his partner, he would have to resist the urge to punch him in the face. “I can’t afford to buy another roll of film, and even if I could, I wouldn’t have time to develop it. I can’t believe I’m too stupid to even use a camera properly. I should just drop out.”

“I’ll help you, Renjun,” Donghyuck said. He put his hand over Renjun’s indignant fist. “I’m decent at After Effects. I think if we turn the contrast up a bit, we can salvage what you have. And your professor will understand. Bolexes are hard to use.”

Renjun raised his head and wiped his cheeks with his sleeve. He might have been a little ashamed at crying in the middle of the dining hall, but he’d found that others did it with surprising frequency, so he figured it didn’t matter. Defeated tears were simply part of the freshman agenda.

On the bright side, he and Donghyuck had been invited to work on Dongyoung’s set that evening. After his Bolex incident, he’d specifically asked not to be put in charge of anything camera related, which Dongyoung had graciously allowed.

“You can be my junior director,” Donghyuck had told him. “By which I mean you can help me carry my things and bring me coffee. But you’ll also get to shadow me up close and see how it works. Does that sound good?”

It sounded more than good. Finally, something to get him excited about filmmaking again. He missed the feeling of watching something come together, of seeing the frames fall into place and make something bigger than themselves.

Dongyoung picked him and Donghyuck up at four. Donghyuck’s own mentor happened to be Dongyoung’s sound designer, which meant he’d be able to shadow on-set, too. In the car, Renjun sat in the passenger’s seat, while Donghyuck remained unbuckled in the back so that he could hover between Renjun and Dongyoung’s shoulders, asking a million questions.

“So how many cameras do you have on set?”

“Two,” Dongyoung responded, trying to keep his eyes on the road despite the distraction. “We only use one at a time while we shoot. The second one is a back up in case the battery dies.”

“What about lights?”

Dongyoung grinned. “Man, you really wanna know everything, huh?”

“Of course I do. I’m gonna make films someday, too. I want to know how to do it right.”

“This is why I love you freshmen. The cynicism hasn’t gotten to you yet.”

Renjun thought that making movies was the one thing cynicism could never touch for him. He didn’t like to imagine a world where storytelling was a chore. “Do you feel cynical about it, Dongyoung?”

“Sometimes,” his mentor admitted, flicking on his turn signal as they arrived at an intersection. “It gets hard. Working on projects non-stop is exhausting. Having to be critiqued every week takes a toll on your confidence, especially when you get feedback you don’t expect.” He tapped his fingers on the wheel as they waited for green. “But I always get drawn back into it eventually. I think the cynicism is just part of the process. It makes it so you have to search out all the little things that made you love movies in the first place, and then you treasure them so much more. Because you understand all the work that goes into it.”

They pulled into the parking lot on location. Dongyoung’s senior film was about a girl-turned-thief who stole money to help pay for her ill mother’s medication. The scene they were shooting that day took place at a storage unit warehouse. When they walked inside, Dongyoung’s producer was already there, carrying a binder full of notes and charts, pacing up and down the corridor. Behind her, a few of the other set assistant’s had begun to put up lights and assemble boom poles, while others were lying gaffer tape over the wires that ran across the floor.

“Hey,” she said running up to meet them. “Want to come double check our marks? I measured it out, so we should be good, but…”

Dongyoung followed her, leaving Renjun and Donghyuck to gaze around in wonder.

“Wow,” Donghyuck breathed. “It’s like a real film set.”

“It _is_ a real film set,” Renjun reminded him.

“You know what I meant. It doesn’t feel like something made just by students.”

It was true. Everyone there seemed to know exactly what they were doing, contentedly busy as they raced around, carrying bundles of cords and random props. One of them approached -- Donghyuck’s mentor, Renjun realized, a man with a short beard and a newsboy cap -- hefting a silver box adorned with rows of buttons and dials, and a pair of expensive looking headphones plugged into it. “Hey. We’re setting up the 702s right now. Wanna see how it’s done?”

Donghyuck’s smile took up half his face. “Yes -- of course I do!” Too giddily, he bounded after his mentor, half-tripping over one of the taped-down wires. Renjun snorted, then began to trail his way around the set.

The actress was sitting to the side, on a metal folding chair, script in her lap. She flipped through the pages, eyes sharp with focus as she rehearsed her lines under her breath. Beyond, inside one of the storage units, objects were being arranged for the scene: jewelry, trinkets, all kinds of things she could shove into her bag and make off with. Dongyoung stood at the front, pointing to where he wanted things placed, meticulous about every little detail. A camera operator ran up to him then, showing him the display, trying to decide the best framings for their shot list.

It reminded Renjun of a beehive. Organized chaos, a million moving parts. And each of those parts relied on the rest. One thing out of place, the wrong timing, and the entire production would screech to a halt. Renjun did not understand how Dongyoung did it. But he realized that, three years ago, Dongyoung had been exactly where he was now, a clueless freshman stepping onto a set for the first time, overwhelmed but inspired.

 _This’ll be me, someday,_ he thought.

“Renjun!” Dongyoung had raised an arm, beckoning him over. “Come here, I want you to see this.”

Renjun set his mouth in a determined line, and began to weave his way through the crew towards his mentor. Donghyuck’s words from the car ride had become resonant -- he would learn how to make a film, and make it right.

\---

During the eighth week of the semester, Renjun finally worked up the courage to ask Jeno to hang out. It was after he’d thankfully sorted out his Bolex project (Donghyuck had helped him to shape it up, and he’d scraped by with a C+) and written his first paper for his poli-sci class. Frankly, he had no idea what was happening in that class at any time and found the textbook unreadable -- for his paper, he’d just regurgitated the material from the chapter but swapped the words around a little to make it less noticeable. Maybe it was lazy, but the professor had not seemed to pick up on his trick, which he considered a small blessing.

He texted Jeno on a Saturday afternoon.

_hey jeno!!! i was wondering if you wanted to go to the student union with me tonight!! they’re having an event where they’re giving out free ice cream!!_

_That sounds fun, but I don’t think I can. I have to study for a midterm tonight. Sorry!_

_awwww :( r u sure?? it wouldn’t be for long…… i thought maybe we could catch up some more now that i’m sober_

_I don’t know, Renjun. This test is really important._

_please??????? pretty please????? you can tell me all about my bones and organs and stuff!! it might help you to study!! that’s what you’re learning, right?_

_It’s a physics exam, but fine, you wore me down._

Renjun did a little dance at his desk.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Yukhei asked, from up in his loft. He was eating Cheetos in bed (Renjun was glad they were not pistachios, now that he knew what they signified), and had orange cheese dust at the corner of his mouth and sprinkled down the front of his shirt. “Is that supposed to be a dance?”

“I’m an excellent dancer. You’re just intimidated by my moves.”

“Fat chance. Dancing is lame. Headbanging is where it’s at.”

“You’re basically just a stereotype of yourself, you know that?” Renjun swiveled in his chair, arm over its back. “I bet you play guitar, too, huh?”

“Nah, man. Drums. They’re more hardcore.”

Renjun was extremely happy that Yukhei played drums. There was no way he could fit a drumset in their dorm room. It had probably saved Renjun a hundred headaches.

At seven-thirty, Renjun pulled on his jacket and walked to the student union. It was a pretty night, the sunset vibrant pink and turning the clouds neon at their edges. If it were a movie, he thought, he would be able to see stars, small and softly-lit, freckling the horizon; but as it was, they were still hiding. Maybe they were waiting until he and Jeno left, knowing it would be the most romantic moment to make their appearance.

It was a silly thought, but it made his heart flutter.

Jeno was already there when he arrived, standing inside at one of the tables, waiting. Renjun wondered how it was that someone could look so good one hundred percent of the time, regardless of what he wore -- right now, he was wearing his glasses instead of bothering with his contacts, an oversized hoodie, and baggy sweatpants. Renjun couldn’t help but think Jeno was just showing off at this point, in a “hey, look at me, I’m hot without even trying” kind of way.

The line was long to the ice cream cart, winding through the lobby like a snake. He and Jeno took their spots at its end. Renjun was grateful for it -- it would give them plenty of time to talk while they waited.

“So how’s your semester so far?” he asked, attempting to look casually cute by standing with one sleeve of his jacket displaced from his shoulder, as if he hadn’t even noticed it had slipped down.

“Busy,” Jeno said. “I knew it would be, but it still surprises me how much work I have to do.”

Renjun did not quite know what being pre-med entailed, but it sounded intense. He at least knew medical school required stupidly high grades. Perhaps Jeno was afraid of letting his coursework slip again like it had in high school. It was a lot of pressure, when he’d already fallen short of his goal once.

“Oh yeah. Bio major, right?”

“Yup. With a physics minor.”

Renjun could not imagine a stronger one-two punch of tedium, but he didn’t say that. Instead, he asked about something he’d been wondering since the day Jeno had helped him with his tripod.

“You said you wanted to be a neurologist now, not a pediatrician, right? What changed your mind?”

Jeno stuffed his hands into his pockets, hunching his shoulders, an unexpected gesture of shyness. “Well… after my grandpa died, I realized that I wanted to research the kind of stuff that could have helped him. I want to find a cure.”

“For Alzheimer’s, you mean?”

“Yeah.” Jeno was looking at Renjun, but really, Renjun felt as though he was being stared right through. Jeno’s head was somewhere else. Wrapped up in his own thoughts, lost in them. “I’m fascinated by it -- how memory works. I’m scared of it, too.” He chuckled. “I guess that’s why I want to figure it out so badly. Is that selfish? To want to fix it, just because it could happen to me someday?”

“Of course not,” Renjun answered. He forgot for a moment that they were in the middle of a crowded building, among a bustle that was oblivious to their conversation. He felt like they stood in their own bubble. It was strangely sacred. “It isn’t selfish. You watched it happen to someone you love. It makes sense that you’d want to help to change it. Isn’t changing the world the least selfish thing a person can do?”

Jeno snapped back into the present, his eyes locking on Renjun’s. “You think so?”

“I want to change the world, too.” Renjun had never realized it before, or at least never verbalized it. But when he said it, it was like a dream coming into full focus, a sudden clarity at the end of his lens. “I think movies can change the world. They make you look at things like you’ve never looked at them before. That’s why I want to make them.”

Jeno turned and faced ahead in the line. His sleeve brushed Renjun’s. “I like that,” he said.

Renjun felt warm all over, like the summer sun was beating down on him in the middle of spring.

\---

After a twenty minute wait (a wait too long to be worth that ice cream, if Renjun was honest, but that was plenty worthwhile for other reasons), they walked out of the student union. The sky had darkened, and to his delight, the stars were peaking through the curtain of clouds, just like he’d wanted, bathed in oil black night. Beside him, Jeno licked melting ice cream from the side of his cone before it could touch his fingers. They were not heading anywhere in particular -- their dorms were on opposite sides of the campus -- so instead they found a bench in the center of a quad and sat, legs kicked out over the cool gray concrete.

“Aren’t you glad you did this tonight instead of study for your dumb physics exam?” Renjun asked. He’d already made it down to the cone, having eaten without patience, and took a loud, crunchy bite from its side.

Jeno groaned. “Shit. I totally forgot about that.” He took another bite of his ice cream, as if the sweetness might distract from the dread. “But I guess it was worth it. I think I stress too much about school stuff. It was nice to get out for a while.”

Renjun’s gaze settled at Jeno’s lips. He popped the last of his cone into his mouth and chewed slowly. “You’ve got ice cream on your face.”

“Why do I have a sense of deja vu, but in reverse?”

Renjun chortled. Popsicle-stained mouths, sitting side by side, bodies overtaken by curiosity. It had only been three years ago, but it felt like longer.

“You’d better not try to kiss me,” Jeno warned, smirking.

Renjun’s stomach felt suddenly empty, needing more even though he should have been full. A different kind of hunger.

“What would you do if I did?” he dared to ask.

Jeno wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and Renjun could not read his expression beneath it.

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Jeno said, looking away.

“But --” The word was an inelegant thud, dropped like a heavy heart. “Jeno, I thought -- I thought we were having fun, and --”

Jeno stopped eating. His ice cream was melting again, running over his hand in a messy chocolate swirl, but he didn’t stoop to stop it. “I _did_ have fun. That doesn’t mean I want us to get back together, Renjun. I’m sorry. I just can’t right now.”

Renjun did not want his heart to be broken again. He did not want to miss a boy who lived on the very same campus, less than a mile away, who he might pass everyday for the next four years. It would be too cruel.

“You kissed me back,” he murmured. “You kissed me back at the party. Why would you do that, if you weren’t interested?”

“I’d been drinking too, Renjun. Not as much as you had, but enough.” He spread a hand in an exasperated gesture, finger wrought with tension, and a few drops of ice cream plinked against the ground. “I got all caught up in the moment, and you did, too. But we were together _three years ago._ We were kids. And now we’re adults, and we’ve got to think about things differently.” He paused, seeing the devastation on Renjun’s face. He spoke softly, trying to ease it. “I think, sometimes, that maybe we over-romanticize things. Like, us being together seemed so great because it was the first time we’d ever done something like that. Maybe our brains were tricking us into thinking it was this huge, momentous thing. But it wasn’t. It was just two kids fooling around.”

Renjun felt hollow. Now he knew how Jeno could have forgotten him. Because Jeno did not place the same weight on their relationship as he did. To Jeno, it was a summer fling. To Renjun, it was his first love. Real, honest-to-God love. Was it possible for it to be both at once? Love and not-love at the same time? Or could there only be one reality, one point-of-view? Renjun could not reconcile their two versions of that summer. They were two strips of film, playing in tandem, overlaid but out of sync.

“I’m sorry,” Jeno said.

“It’s okay,” Renjun responded stiffly.

“I -- I didn’t mean to be harsh. I just need this year to figure things out for myself, without thinking about romance or the past or anything like that.” Jeno exhaled, a slow release. “But I still want to be your friend. I understand if that won’t work for you. But if it’s alright --”

“Of course we can still be friends,” Renjun said. He forced his hurt down, closing it in a box, locking it tight, tossing the key. Jeno was right about one thing -- freshman year was the time for figuring yourself out, and there was no room for hurt feelings in that. “We’ll always be friends. That won’t ever change.”

Jeno broke into a relieved smile. “I’m glad. I didn’t want to lose touch again.”

Renjun tried to return the smile. It was uncomfortable, but manageable. “Here,” he said, wriggling the extra napkin he’d got at the ice cream stand from his pocket and handing it to Jeno.

Jeno thanked him, wiped the mess from his fingers, and said, “Thanks for inviting me out. I’ll see you.” Then he stood, tossed the napkin and the remainder of his ice cream in the trash can, and walked away, his figure growing small and distant.

Renjun sat a few minutes longer, staring up at the stars as they multiplied over the night sky, thinking they were too lovely for such a sad moment. If it were a movie, he thought, it would simply fade to black.

\---

Renjun lay in his bed, laptop open beside him.

He still had all the footage he’d shot three years prior on his camcorder. The footage of Jeno at the market, Jeno rooting around in Renjun’s uncle’s boxes and belongings, Jeno walking along the roadside, summer breeze stirring his hair.

The moment Renjun revisited the most, however, was their final night. The two of them lying in the hammock, camera focused on the dimming sunset, their voices audible in the background. Back when he’d first left, when he’d first felt their separation like a horrible ache, he’d used to watch that video over and over, trying to relive it, trying to remember what Jeno’s warmth had felt like beside him. But the more and more he’d watched it, the less real it had felt.

 _Movies are realer than real life,_ he’d said. _They always tell the truth._

He’d been foolish when he’d said it. He did not want a movie. He did not want an illusion, an old memory that only existed on a screen, because with time, it had grown to be not enough. He wanted something tangible and real and present.

Now, he watched it again, cheek pressed to his pillow, eyes half-lidded as sleepiness crept in like fog.

 _I’ll come back, and we can spend next summer together again,_ his own voice said from behind the camcorder.

_Maybe you will. But maybe you won’t. We can’t plan that far ahead._

_Are you breaking up with me?_

On screen, the clouds shifted behind the trees, time slipping away from them. The whole shot wobbled, as if Renjun’s hands had been shaking as he’d filmed.

 _It’s not really a relationship if we can’t even touch each other, is it?_ said Jeno. _Maybe we’re just naive, because we were each other’s first loves._

There it was. The words that should have been Renjun’s first clue. The exact thing Jeno had told him again just a few minutes ago. Despite how many times he’d rewatched that video, it had never occurred to him quite what Jeno had meant by it. He’d meant for it to be over.

Their conversation continued -- soft, intimate whispers that wove in and out, like the voices of ghosts. Renjun fell asleep to the video playing, one earbud in, one out, lying overtop of his heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/playing_prince) | [cc](https://curiouscat.me/playing_prince)


	3. fall semester

Renjun was half-excited to return to Hanyang, half-reluctant.

His summer vacation had been mostly uneventful. He’d received his final grades for the spring semester one week into the break, and had to sheepishly show them to his parents. B’s across the board, except for a C in his Intro to Political Science class. They’d been understandably disappointed, but at the very least he had not failed anything. And his mother had even asked to see the work he’d done in his film production class, which felt a little bit like a victory to him.

The excitement was to get back and hang out Donghyuck and Jaemin, and to get to work on his first short film. The reluctance was at the thought of seeing Jeno again.

Despite what they’d said about staying friends, they had not met up again for the rest of the spring after their ice cream not-date. They’d continued to message each other on occasion, but even through text Renjun could sense the intense awkwardness of it. They were going to fizzle out again, just as they had years ago. Renjun knew it, and he dreaded it, but he couldn’t bring himself to hang out with Jeno. It was too embarrassing, after being rejected.

Also, he was still in love with him. Not exactly an ideal situation when they were supposed to “just be friends.”

Renjun wished, desperately, that he was not in love with Jeno.

And so, he was in for an unfortunate, breath-stealing shock when he walked into his first class of the fall semester. It was Intro to Philosophy, a gen ed class in which he’d been enrolled by his academic advisor to rack up the credits he needed. He sat in the far back of the room, in the hopes he could get away with doing homework or online shopping or a computer game during class, since frankly he didn’t give a damn about Aristotle or whatever it was they’d be talking about. He dropped his backpack on the floor beside his chair, then slumped into his seat.

In the next row, sitting diagonally to him, was an easily recognizable back of a head.

“Oh my god,” he whispered.

Jeno looked up, alerted at the sound, and turned to see Renjun behind him. His face was blank at first, equally as surprised as Renjun, but then he smiled.

“Hey,” he said. “Did you get placed here for your gen ed, too?”

Renjun forced a smile back, ignoring the flip-flopping of his heart -- from love to hurt, its beating frantic and painful. “Haha, yeah. Weird coincidence.”

“Maybe we can study together this semester.”

Renjun thought that would be a sort of exquisite torture. He also knew he could not bring himself to say no.

“Sure,” he said, wincing at his own words. “Sounds good.”

Jeno turned back around, and clicked his pen.

Renjun buried his face in his folded arms, agonized.

\---

He met up with Donghyuck and Jaemin that night for dinner. When Donghyuck saw him, he sprinted across the dining hall and lifted Renjun off his feet, spinning him around and nearly whacking a girl who passed by with a precariously stacked plate of salad.

“Renjunnie,” he cooed. “I’ve missed you so much.”

“I can tell.”

He set him down, and they made their way to their favorite table, the corner booth that faced the television. They never watched it properly, since it was too loud in there to hear it anyway, but they sometimes liked to switch the channel until they found an appropriately dramatic-looking TV show and supply their own dialogue to accompany it.

Today, however, there were more pressing matters to discuss.

“I’m not entirely convinced he isn’t still into you,” Donghyuck said through a mouthful of chocolate cake. He’d decided to start with dessert, leaving his chicken tenders untouched. “I mean, he kissed you at that party. And then he went out for ice cream with you -- it should have been pretty obvious it was supposed to be a date, right?”

“I don’t know,” Renjun said, sighing into his tea. “I… I really thought he liked me. I understand why he never responded to me -- it sounded like he had a lot of personal stuff going on -- but now that we’re back at school… I just don’t get it.”

Jaemin began to work on Donghyuck’s chicken tenders and offered, softly, “Maybe there’s more to it that you don’t know. Maybe he really, really wants to date you, but he already started dating someone else earlier in the school year. And now he can’t be with you unless he breaks that other person’s heart.”

Renjun groaned. “I can’t decide if that’s better or worse than him just not liking me.”

“Sorry,” Jaemin said.

“It sounded like he was single.” Renjun recalled their discussion on the bench near the student union. It was not hard to do -- the memory of it was burned into his brain. “He said he wanted to focus on himself. He said he wasn’t looking for romance.”

He’d been wondering over those words for weeks, and thought he had begun to understand it. The Jeno he’d known that summer, when they’d been only children, had not lived for himself. He was running errands for his mother, taking devoted care of his grandfather, chasing high grades to be like his sister, pursuing a career as a pediatrician to please his father. When had he ever had the chance to focus on himself and what he wanted? The change from pediatrics to neurology was probably the first thing he’d ever done purely for his own happiness.

So Renjun could not begrudge him for wanting his freshman year for himself. And Jeno was the one worrying about being selfish -- really, wasn’t Renjun the selfish one, for still wanting Jeno even after he’d been told it was over?

“Maybe you ought to just let it go for now,” Donghyuck suggested. “You don’t need to be dating someone to be happy.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Renjun countered. “You two have been together since high school. What do you know about being unhappy?”

Donghyuck set his fork down on his plate of half-eaten cake, looking suddenly not hungry.

“I’m sorry.” Renjun pressed his palms to his closed eyes, letting out a long breath. “I shouldn’t have said that. It was shitty of me.”

Donghyuck offered a forgiving smile and placed a hand on Renjun’s shoulder. “Let’s just look forward to the fun things, okay? Like Production II tomorrow.”

Renjun and Donghyuck had coordinated over the summer to try and get into as many classes together as they could. It hadn’t panned out entirely -- they’d ended up in different screenwriting classes, because of a conflict with Donghyuck’s Music Theory class, which he was taking for his minor -- but thankfully, they’d both managed to land the same Production II section.

Renjun’s heart grew a little lighter at the thought.

“Oh, by the way.” Donghyuck turned, and began to rummage through his bag. When he pulled his hand out and unfolded it, he revealed a little rainbow flag pin, exactly like the one on his backpack. “I got this for you over break. Here.”

Renjun took it, tracing his finger over the shiny enamel, and smiled.

\---

Papers were passed along the rows of the classroom. At the top were the words “Semester Project: Short Film” in bold font, and below was a list of requirements. Five to seven minutes long. Must be a narrative. Must include sound. May not contain copyrighted music or footage. Teams, of four people maximum, are expected to divide the work roughly equally among themselves.

_Teams._

When Renjun looked up, Donghyuck had already scooted his chair close, claiming him. Then, he waved over two others from across the room. Donghyuck was the type of person who was friends with everyone, it seemed -- he often lingered in the post-production lab and pounced on unsuspecting homework-doers, talking their ears off until they had to submit to his overbearing friendliness. Renjun was glad of it. He would have been hopeless at finding teammates on his own.

One was a girl with round glasses and short, choppy purple hair named Soomi. She was the type Renjun might have automatically profiled as an art student if he hadn’t already known it -- oversized denim jacket, vertically-striped pants with big flowy legs, about a million piercings in each ear and snakebites in her bottom lip. When she introduced herself, her voice was deep and lilting and smokey, the kind of voice that would be great for radio.

The other, Jaeyoung, was a heavy and almost impossibly tall boy with a shaved head. Renjun found him intimidating at first, until he opened his mouth and the first thing out of it was, “I like your shoes,” as he pointed at Renjun’s filthy, daisy-yellow Converse.

“Thanks,” Renjun responded.

He decided that this would be a very good team.

They had the rest of the class period to begin brainstorming. Soomi took a piece of paper from her messenger bag and clicked her mechanical pencil. “So. I guess the first thing to do is come up with a story idea. It should be something simple, with only one or two characters. And we should try to limit the amount of dialogue in it, so that the audio is easier to edit later.”

“It has to be a small story, too,” Donghyuck added. “It can’t be longer than seven minutes.”

They stared at each other in a pensive circle. It was harder than Renjun had expected -- whenever he thought of making a film, he thought of an epic, something with pages upon pages of screenplay. Short films could not have any extra fat. They needed to be streamlined, straight to the point.

“Well…” Soomi stopped chewing her eraser and tapped it contemplatively against her chin. “Maybe we should start by ruling stuff out? Like, what do we definitely not want to do?”

“Probably stuff that needs a lot of effects, right?” Jaeyoung suggested. “Or stuff that needs an elaborate set. So, sci-fi would be a no-go. Or really anything we can’t film on campus.”

“Right.” Soomi made a column labeled _NO_ and wrote _sci-fi_ and _off-campus shoots_ beneath it. “I’d also like to propose no films about college. I can’t think of a lamer thing than college kids making a film about being college kids, filmed in a dorm or something.”

“I concur,” Donghyuck said. It was added to the list.

Soomi blinked as an idea came to her. “Hey -- how about this. We could do a romance. That way, we would only need two characters. And there are a lot of ways to communicate love or attraction without dialogue. Plus. we wouldn’t need a fancy set. Just two people. We could just sit them at a table or something, even.”

Donghyuck leaned in, grinning. “Ooh -- I like that.”

Renjun’s heart sank. The last thing he needed right now was to work on a romance film for a full semester. Almost anything else sounded a better alternative.

“Uh… I don’t know about that,” he said, trying to word it carefully so as not to sound like a stick in the mud. “Romances are kind of cliche, right? I think it would be hard to make a good one.”

“You’re right.” Jaeyoung tapped his toe against the carpeted floor, a muffled, repetitive thud. “If we did it, we’d have to come up with a decent premise. That way it isn’t just some silly boy-meets-girl thing.”

“What about this?” Soomi was so excited at her new idea that her whole body seemed invigorated, bobbed hair bouncing. “It could be kind of a fantasy-romance. Maybe one of them is a storybook character, and the other person falls in love with them -- and then they come to life.”

“Oh! I’ll do you one better.” Donghyuck was at the very edge of his seat as he explained it. “Instead of a book, could it be a movie? That way it’s kinda meta. You know?”

Jaeyoung nodded approvingly. “A movie about falling in love with a movie character, huh? That’s kind of neat.”

The train was running away from Renjun. There was no catching it now. He could see it in their eyes -- this was an idea they all believed in. And he would not stamp it out just because he was bitter.

“I think that works,” he conceded quietly.

“Great.” Soomi wrote their premise out on her paper. With every word, her smile broadened. “Next, we should think about roles. Any preferences?”

“Renjun should choose first,” Donghyuck said quickly, “since we all kinda steamrolled him with our idea.”

“What? You don’t have to do that. I’m fine with the idea, really.”

Donghyuck gave him a knowing look, brows cocked. He could tell that Renjun had been resistant to a romance, and was trying to make it up to him. “Come on. I want you to have fun on this, too.”

Renjun wondered what kind of good karma he’d built up in his past life to deserve such a good friend.

“Fine,” he said. “Can I be the director, then?”

Soomi immediately took it down. “Sure. And I’m guessing Donghyuck wants to be in charge of sound, right?”

“Is that a real question?”

“What about you, Jaeyoung?”

“If no one else wants to,” he said, “I’ll be the camera operator.”

“Then I’ll be in charge of editing,” Soomi declared. “And anything else, we can divide up when it comes time. Looks like we’ve got all our bases covered.”

“What about actors?” Jaeyoung asked. “It’s better to cast them sooner rather than later, that way we can start filming as early as possible.”

“If it makes things easier,” Soomi said, “I can play the girl. If I’m editing, I won’t actually have that much to do on set.”

“But what about the guy?”

Renjun had a sudden, prickling, tempting thought. He considered pushing it back down, biting his tongue. But it pushed forward anyway, forcing open his mouth, spilling itself across the table.

“I think I might know someone who would do it,” he said.

\---

At his next Intro to Philosophy class, Renjun beelined to Jeno’s desk.

Jeno was already there, folding his earbud wires and placing them into his backpack, then moving to take a sip from his coffee cup. When he noticed Renjun approaching, he stopped, cup half-raised to his mouth.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.” Renjun tugged nervously at the ends of his sleeves, wrapping the fabric around his thumbs. “I have a favor to ask you.”

“Oh? What is it?”

“I want you to act in my film.”

Jeno seemed to again consider a sip from his cup. His hand hovered, debating its intent, then finally settled back against his desktop, coffee abandoned as he tried to process the request. “What do you mean?”

“I’m making a short film for class this semester. Me and my team need an actor.”

Jeno’s eyes flicked up towards the clock on the wall. They had ten minutes before class began.

“I don’t know, Renjun. I’m kind of busy. And I’m not an actor.”

Renjun went to claim his desk at the back of the room, and wheeled it all the way up to sit right next to Jeno, blocking the aisle. They were those weird wheely desks which Renjun did not like much, because the swively-ness was a constant distraction to him during class, but it _did_ make them a good tool for cornering people.

“Please,” he begged. “We can’t do it ourselves, because we’ll be working the equipment. And I can’t ask anyone in my major, because they’re all gonna be working on their own projects.”

“I have my own classes to worry about --”

“It’s only a five minute film. We’d only need to do a couple of shoots. It wouldn’t take much time at all. And if we don’t find an actor, we’ll have to completely change our idea.”

He could see the brick wall of Jeno’s resolve chipping away. Maybe it was unfair for Renjun to plead with someone so kind and bendable -- Jeno could never resist helping someone who needed it. It was one of the many reasons Renjun still loved him.

“If… if you really, really need me to, I will,” Jeno finally said.

Renjun nearly jumped triumphantly into the air, but remembered he was in the middle of a classroom full of strangers, and managed to hold it back.

“I’ll text you the details,” he whispered, as he wheeled himself backwards to his spot.

\---

_donghyuck!!!!!!! actor acquired!!!!_

_Wait, really?? that was fast!_

_yeah! so we should be all set to shoot once the script and storyboards are finalized_

_May I ask who it is you got to play the part?_

_you don’t know him_

_Is it Jeno._

_i don’t know why you immediately jumped to that conclusion_

_but yes_

_Oh my god_

_Renjun_

_what_

_I don’t know. I’m just……. suspicious_

_i have no idea what you’re talking about_

_I’m serious right now_

_Did you ask him to do it because you want to spend more time with him?_

_Like…….. did you do it because you’re still into him._

Renjun swallowed nervously as he looked down at his phone. That wasn’t exactly what had been running though his mind when he’d done it. But he knew that some part of him -- some deep, innate, impossible to ignore part -- had done it for exactly that reason. He didn’t want Jeno to slip away from him again. What better way to do it than by shackling him to a semester long project?

_i don’t know…… maybe i did_

_i know that maybe that’s pathetic but_

_i don’t know donghyuck_

_Renjun, it’s not worth chasing after a guy who’s already rejected you_

_I don’t want this to affect our project if you two end up in a tiff or something_

_i’ll tell him we don’t need him to do the part anymore_

_i’m sorry_

_i didn’t think it through_

_I’m not mad at you, I just think it was kind of irresponsible_

_And if he already agreed to do it, we might as well go with it. It would be too hard to find someone else._

_i’m really sorry_

_It’s okay_

Renjun resisted the urge to beat his head against his bedpost.

Of course it had been a stupid thing to do. He was being dishonest with himself and his teammates and, even worse than that, dishonest with Jeno about why he’d wanted him for the project.

“What the hell is wrong with me?” he muttered, pressing his forehead to his desk. He turned his phone over so he wouldn’t have to look at it and relive his shame.

“Well, for one thing, you’re kind of a nerd,” Yukhei called from across their room.

“Now is really not the time.”

Yukhei was quiet for a moment, seemingly taken aback at Renjun’s seriousness.

“Are you good?” he asked.

“No. I’m inconsolably miserable.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not with you.”

Quiet again, aside from the low buzz of their A/C.

“I can be a good listener sometimes, you know,” Yukhei said, sounding strangely hurt. “I know I don’t seem like a real sensitive guy, but I kind of am. I’m a musician. Music requires a sensitive heart.”

“You are full of shit,” Renjun responded, forcing himself to sit up straight and rubbing his face in exasperation. “But if you really want to hear about my personal drama, then I guess I have nothing to lose from it.”

He spun his chair around. Yukhei was poking his head out from the curtain below his loft, which he’d pushed aside to expose the flickering of candlelight on the back wall and a mess of pistachio shells on the carpet. “Join me.”

“I’m not coming in there if you’re going to be eating your sex pistachios.”

“They aren’t strictly for sex. Sometimes a pistachio is just a pistachio.”

Reluctantly, Renjun walked over and ducked his head to join Yukhei under the loft. Yukhei was sitting on the floor, and on either end of the bed frame were stacks of boxes, which Renjun assumed were filled with something weird like spellbooks or bones or haunted dolls. On top of the boxes were rows of red candles, tall and short, clearly used many times judging by their black wicks and pools of hardened wax at their bases.

“I can’t believe it,” Renjun said. “You really do have a secret seance area under your bed.”

“It’s not for seances. It’s for vibing.”

“Whatever you say.” Renjun carefully stepped around even more candles, which were in a circle on the floor, and settled across from Yukhei, legs criss-crossed.

Yukhei tilted the bag of pistachios in his direction. Renjun grimaced in disgust, but he was hungry, so he took a handful and tried not to think about their more indecent uses.

“Now,” Yukhei said. “Tell me about your problems.”

“Promise you won’t laugh or make fun of me.”

“Nah, man. I’ve got your back.”

Renjun wondered if Yukhei had actually been kinda cool this whole time, or if he was just so disheartened that even Yukhei’s questionable attempts at friendliness were beginning to seem a comfort.

He sighed, and began, “Firstly, for context, I am gay.”

“Nice.”

Renjun did not know what kind of response he had expected, but he supposed _nice_ was as good as he could hope for aside from perhaps _me too._ “So I had a boyfriend in high school. We were together for the summer, but then we just sort of drifted apart after that. I didn’t see him again for a few years -- until last semester, because it turns out we’re both attending Hanyang.”

Yukhei munched loudly on his pistachios and tossed another empty shell in the middle of the candle circle. “Ah. I see where this is going.”

“I don’t think you do.”

Yukhei gave a clever smirk. “Obviously, seeing him again has reawoken your old affection, but your ex doesn’t feel the same way, and it’s resulted in hurt feelings and an awkward tension between the two of you.”

Renjun blinked. “That… was surprisingly accurate.”

“I told you, I’m good at this stuff.” He turned and began to lift the lids of one of the boxes behind him. “So. Do you want me to put a curse on him? We can get revenge for your broken heart.”

“Please do not curse my ex,” Renjun said hurriedly, reaching over and placing his hand over Yukhei’s to still it. He did not believe in curses, per se, but he also was not willing to risk it, in the event that Yukhei possessed a touch of dark energy somewhere in his soul after summoning a demon, or whatever it was he did for fun. “I need him able and productive. He’s working on my project with me this semester.”

Yukhei shrugged off Renjun’s hand and continued to dig in his box. Renjun was afraid he might pull out a toad or a handful of loose teeth or something, but instead, it was an incense stick, a tray, and a lighter.

“You know we’re not allowed to burn those in here, right?” Renjun asked.

“What the hell is Hanyang going to do? Kick me out?”

“Yes.”

Yukhei ignored him, set his incense beside his candles, and lit its end. The canopied bed frame filled with the scent of frankincense. “So he’s working with you on your project. Did you have that happen on purpose?”

“I know I shouldn’t have. But… I just want to be able to spend time with him.” Admitting it was nearly enough to make him cry. He shoved a pistachio into his mouth, hoping it would help to distract from the sorrowful stinging of his throat. “Even if we aren’t dating, I don’t want us to drift apart again. I want this to last as long as possible. I’m just not ready to move on.”

“Hmm.” Yukhei stroked his chin like a wisened guru, a gesture wildly unfitting with his huge eyes and kiddish pout. “It’s a complicated situation. As love often is.”

“Please stop with your faux-smart guy schtick and give me some practical advice.”

“I mean. There’s the obvious solution.”

“Which is?”

“Seduce him.”

Renjun slumped. For some reason, he’d thought Yukhei was cooking up something really profound. He should have known better. “That is not helpful at all.”

“I mean it. Wear some sexy pants. Or a jacket with no shirt underneath. Whatever sexy clothes is for dudes.”

“Alright, I’m out of here.” Renjun got up and pushed aside the curtain. A puff of cool air from outside the incense-and-candle hotbox hit him in the face. “Get back to me when you come up with something useful.”

“Wait --” Yukhei grabbed the curtain from the bottom and snapped it back shut. “How about this. I’ll read your tarot.”

“I don’t really believe in that kind of thing.”

“Just try it. Even if you don’t believe it, it might give you some motivation. Or some new ideas.”

Renjun sighed, but resumed his position on the floor. Yukhei reached into a different box this time (Renjun sincerely hoped to never find out what other kinds of memorabilia they might contain) and took out a deck of tarot cards. He dumped them on the floor, then shuffled them like an elementary schooler by mixing them around in circles with both hands and then clumsily sweeping them back into a pile. Once he had them all turned the right way, he laid nine cards out in the shape of a heart.

“Are you sure you’re doing this right?” Renjun asked. “It seems very… literal.”

“It’s a love spread,” Yukhei explained. “Though I’ve never actually done this before, so --”

“What the hell do you mean, you’ve never done this before?”

“Don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll figure it out. The energy will guide me.” He wiggled his fingers as if casting a spell, then clapped his hands together and took an exaggeratedly big breath. He reached down and flipped the card at the heart’s top left curve.

It was the King of Cups. Yukhei unfolded the tiny paper booklet that had come with the deck, and read, “‘The King of Cups is a card of balance and compassion.’ That sounds pretty good, huh?” He read a little further, and his face fell. “It says they mean different things when they’re upside down. Do they mean upside down to _me,_ or upside down to _you_?”

“What, pray tell, does an upside down King of Cups mean?”

“‘Repression and selfishness.’”

Renjun groaned and fell back against the carpet. His feet kicked the edge of the arrangement, scattering the cards into the air and raining them down beneath the candlelight.

“You ruined it,” Yukhei said flatly. “Guess we’ll never know your fortune.”

One of the cards fluttered down and landed on top of Renjun’s forehead. He lifted it over his face.

It was Death.

“Yukhei,” he whispered, turning the card so he could see it. “Is this a bad sign?”

“It’s the card of endings,” Yukhei answered. Renjun could hear the booklet crinkle under his fingers. “But it can be the card of change, too.”

Renjun tapped the edge of Death to his lips, wondering what it had in store for him.

\---

The film crew sat around a table on the library’s first floor. Soomi once again had her notes out and was filling something in on one of the margins, which, when Renjun leaned in, he saw was only a doodled flower. Jaeyoung was playing a mobile game on his phone, sharply jerking it as if it were a steering wheel, gritting his teeth to show his intense investment. Donghyuck had pulled his chair right up against Renjun’s, and was resting his head on his shoulder, toying with the string of Renjun’s hoodie.

“Your loser ex is late,” he complained in a whisper.

“I know. I can’t help it. I’ve been texting him, but he hasn’t answered.”

Just then, Jeno came bolting in from the library’s front doors, swerving around the fishtank to their table. “Hey,” he said, dropping his backpack on the floor with a bang as if it were a sack of bricks. His hair was damp with sweat, sticking above his brows. “Sorry, my professor let us out late.”

“Just sit down so we can get started,” Donghyuck said, pulling himself from Renjun’s shoulder and stretching.

Jeno did as he was told, and Soomi produced a pile of papers from her bag and passed them around the table. “Here are the rough scripts. There’s not much in the way of dialogue, but there’s a lot of screen direction, so we should go through it and make sure we all know the story’s beats by heart. Again, I’ll be playing Girl, and Jeno will be playing Boy.”

“What about locations?” Jaeyoung asked. “Did we decide where we’re shooting?”

“Since the girl comes out of a movie, we’ll need somewhere with a TV. I was thinking we could shoot in the rec room on my dorm’s floor, and then for the date scene, we could shoot outside somewhere. Like, maybe near the gymnasium -- there’s a walking trail that goes through the woods there. It might make for some pretty scenery.”

“That sounds good,” Renjun said. “It’ll give us some nice ambient noise, too.” He flipped idly through the pages of the script. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that Jeno had gone still across the table, staring blankly down at his own script.

“What is it?” Renjun asked.

“It says Soomi and I are supposed to kiss?” Jeno looked over at her, head tilted questioningly.

She shrugged. “It _is_ a romance. If it helps, I’m a lesbian. Not like I’ll be getting anything out of it.”

“I don’t have an issue with it,” Jeno clarified. His gaze flicked back in Renjun’s direction. “I’m just surprised, I guess.”

 _Surprised that I’m allowing it,_ Renjun figured. He hadn’t known Soomi was writing a kiss into it, either. If he was being totally honest with himself, it did bother him a little. But he wasn’t about to let Jeno know that -- not after they’d agreed to just be friends.

Dismissively, Renjun closed his script and said, “Looks good to me. Are there any other questions?”

Jeno shook his head. “No. I think I get it.”

“Then I guess the first thing to do would be to go do some test shots on-location, that way we can figure it out ahead of time.”

“Let’s try and get that done this week,” Jaeyoung said. “I can rent out the camera and tripod. Then we can start shooting properly next week.”

Donghyuck peered over Soomi’s shoulder as she scrawled their plan, and added, “We should start with the outside scene, if we can. It’ll start getting cold soon, so we’ll want to get it out of the way while the weather’s still warm.”

“I guess that’s everything, then,” Soomi said, beginning to pack her things. “If any other questions come up about the script, let me know. But I think we should be good.”

The rest of them began to pull on their jackets and backpacks, moving towards the exit. Renjun quickly snagged Jeno by the sleeve before he could walk away.

“Hey,” he said. “I hope this is all making sense to you. I know I kind of strong-armed you into it, but…”

Jeno smiled. “It’s alright. Maybe it’ll be something fun to do between bio assignments. It’ll help me get out of the dorm, too.”

Renjun felt a sudden discomfort. He realized how little he knew about Jeno’s college life -- did he spend all his time shut up in his room, bent over textbooks, going hours without saying a single word to another person? Had he been able to make many friends in his classes? Was Jeno even happy there? It had never occurred to Renjun, since Jeno had been so popular in high school. But high school and college were different beasts, and you could not survive one the same way you survived the other. Maybe that was why Jeno had insisted upon them staying friends. Maybe he didn’t have anyone else.

Meanwhile, Renjun himself had had more friends sitting at the table just then than he’d had in his entire high school career. It seemed they had grown in different, unexpected directions.

“You know,” Renjun said, “if you’re ever bored, you can text me. Even if you just wanna go to the dining hall or something.”

“Your dorm is across campus from mine,” Jeno pointed out.

“That’s okay. I don’t mind the walk.”

Jeno’s lips were parted in surprise. Renjun wanted to stand on his toes and kiss that surprise right off his face. Instead, he tore himself away, and called over his shoulder, “I’ll let you know what day we plan to shoot. See you.”

“See you,” Jeno echoed.

Renjun walked briskly out of the library, before that stupid, romantic impulse could take hold of him again.

\---

The first shoot took place the next week as they’d planned on a warm Friday afternoon, perhaps the last warm Friday they’d have for the rest of the year as September neared its end. They’d staked out the woods beside the gymnasium shortly after their meeting, and decided it would make a perfectly pretty backdrop -- walking trails adorned in speckled sunlight, the leaves just beginning to change color. It reminded Renjun a bit of the forest near Jeno’s house, the one where they’d swam in the creek and lay across the flat rock and Jeno had told him about the time he’d beaten up that awful kid. A touch of wistfulness crept into his heart, but he tried to shake it off. It was a big day, and he couldn’t let the nostalgia take over, otherwise it would cut up through the ground and shift the earth under his feet and disrupt their shoot like an earthquake.

It was hard when Jeno was sitting just a few feet away from him, wearing a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, open to expose the white tee underneath and some faded blue jeans.

_It should be criminal to look so damn kissable all the time._

“We should be all set over here,” Jaeyoung announced, stepping back from the tripod. “Come look?”

Renjun walked up beside him and pressed his eye to the viewfinder. They were staring down the tunnel of trees, the dirt path leading up through the center of the shot until it disappeared somewhere in the distance. Soomi and Jeno would walk down it, framed by low-hanging branches, shadows of the leaves dancing over their legs and feet. The natural lighting was both a challenge and a gift -- they’d had to search around awhile for the best spot so that the shot would be bright enough, but when they did, it was like stumbling upon gold. It was beautiful. It looked the way all of Renjun’s most beloved, intimate memories did. Perhaps they looked different in Jeno’s mind. But to Renjun, they retained that gold, that perfect movie lighting.

“Good,” Renjun said. He retrieved Soomi and Jeno from the side, where they’d sat on a log, going over their scripts once more, and led them down the path to where they should begin the shot.

“There’s no dialogue in this shot, right?” Jeno asked.

“Nope. Just walking straight towards the camera, until you hit the mark.”

“Sounds kinda awkward.”

“It will be less awkward when we add music in post.”

“Am I supposed to be doing anything? Just walking?”

 _So many questions,_ Renjun thought. _Still a perfectionist, I see._ “Walking. Holding hands. Pretending you’re in love.”

Soomi turned to Jeno, adjusted her glasses, and said, “Here. Look deeply into my eyes to get into character. But don’t accidentally fall in love with me for real. Tempting as that may be.”

Jeno laughed, and it sounded like music to Renjun. He only wished he’d been the one to cause it.

The shoot went well enough for an hour or so. They’d had to move quickly, because the sinking sun meant a shift in their lighting, and if it got too late, they would have to pack up. The quick pace, however, suited Renjun -- it reminded him of the frenetic energy of Dongyoung’s set, and invigorated him as they pushed through into the evening.

Being a director was not easy work. He remembered how, when he was a child, he’d had no idea what a director even did. Understanding the contributions of a writer or an actor was easy enough, but a director’s job had seemed nebulous. Now, he knew that being director was about being everywhere all at once. Watching back shots to ensure their readability, instructing the actors on how to adjust themselves, changing the framing when it simply did not work. A director’s thumbprint was infused in every piece of the production. It was tiring, but fruitful.

At one point, Jeno looked over at Renjun as he stood behind the camera, considering whether their next shot should have a slight push-in at its end, and laughed softly.

“What?” Renjun whipped his head around, wondering if he’d missed something.

“Nothing,” Jeno said. “Just the face you’re making. You’re biting your lip and puffing your cheeks at the same time. You do it every time you focus on something.”

“What?” Renjun’s cheeks flooded pink. “I do not.”

“You totally do,” Donghyuck butted in. “Your directing face.”

“Shut up.”

“It’s cute,” Jeno assured him. “I like it.”

Now that he _had_ been the cause of Jeno’s laughter, Renjun wasn’t sure he was happy about it. It made his heart too sensitive and shaky for his comfort, as if it bore a fresh bruise.

Their time was running out as the light began to dull. Thankfully, they’d gotten to their last shot of the scene, and it was a quick one.

The kiss.

Renjun watched not with puffed cheeks, but a straight line for a mouth.

He saw it in slow motion. Jeno cupping Soomi’s face in his hands, thumbs nudging the frames of her glasses. The way he stooped so their lips could meet, his eyes shut and his lashes dark, the sunlight throwing their shadow over his cheeks. The millisecond of hesitation that came with kissing an acquaintance, then the slow, deliberate movement, trying to make it seem as if he meant it.

Then it was over like it had never happened. They stepped away from each other, awkward, and Jeno asked, if only to fill the silence, “Was that okay?”

“Not gonna lie, it was kind of hot,” Jaeyoung responded.

“Ew,” Donghyuck said.

“Looked fine to me,” Renjun said quickly, not even bothering to play it back and make sure. “I think we’ll call it wraps for today.”

Jaeyoung whooped and began to unscrew the camera from the tripod.

Jeno lingered, scratching at the crook of his arm. “Do you want me to help you guys pick up?” he asked.

“No,” Renjun said. “You don’t have to. I’ll text you when we figure out the next shoot, okay?”

Jeno, seeming almost reluctant, grabbed his bag from where he’d left it beside the log, waved goodbye, and made his way down the forest path towards campus.

Soomi joined Renjun as he knelt by their open cases, helping him to fold the tripod legs. “I’ll admit, he wasn’t bad for a dude. Pretty good kisser, actually.”

Renjun might have said _I know_ if he wasn’t still a little peeved about the whole thing.

“He’s cute, too,” Soomi added, nudging him in the ribs with her elbow. “Is he single? You should totally hit that.”

Renjun let out an exasperated, strangled groan and lay down on the ground, using the tripod case as a pillow.

“Man down,” Donghyuck remarked.

\---

Their first in-class critique was the following week. All the groups were expected to have begun filming and were to show what raw footage they had so far. Renjun was nervous. They’d done critiques last semester, but none of their work had been narrative-based. Now that they were working on a full-fledged story, and something they had all put their minds together to create, it felt strangely more personal to him. It was like the film was his baby -- he could not help but be protective of it.

They filed into the front row of the classroom, right in front of the projector. When the professor asked which group wanted to go first, Donghyuck’s hand shot right into the air.

“Hey,” Renjun hissed.

“What? It’s better if we get it over with.”

Renjun crossed his arms and pouted as the professor loaded their file on her laptop.

Their footage played through. Even though he’d already seen it, Renjun had a hard time watching it again. He was beginning to notice all the little things he wished he could change -- _this shot should be wider, this shot moves too slowly, why did I frame it like that?_ When the kiss was displayed, massive on the projector’s screen, he shut his eyes.

Once it finished, the professor flicked the lights back on, and asked, “Okay. Any feedback?”

A girl in the back row raised her hand. “I think it looks pretty good so far. The acting is a little stiff, but since we aren’t working with professional actors, I think it’s fine.”

Beside Renjun, Soomi rolled her eyes, but still jotted the note down in her book.

“Anyone else?” the professor asked.

A boy spoke up, from the far side of the room. “I agree. All the shots are working right now, so that’s good. I did catch a continuity error, though.”

Renjun began to sweat in his seat.

“Soomi’s hair,” the boy said. “In some of the shots, she has it tied in a ponytail, and in others, it’s down. I guess it isn’t a huge deal, but it stood out to me.”

The professor scrubbed along the video timeline, double-checking. “You’re right. It changes about halfway through. I would recommend refilming for consistency’s sake. Otherwise, you’ll probably be getting some comments about it at our final screening.”

Soomi covered her face with her hands, and whispered, “Oh my god. I took my ponytail out and didn’t even think about it. I’m such an idiot.”

“I didn’t even realize your hair was long enough to put in a ponytail,” Donghyuck said.

“It is. Only barely. Though now I wish it wasn’t.”

They left class in low spirits. Jaeyoung suggested that they just say “fuck it” and leave it the way it was, but in the end, they decided they would have to reshoot. It meant that they would need to squeeze in time for a redo between now and their indoor shoot, and that depended largely on Jeno’s schedule -- he was so busy, that finding free time their first time around had been a struggle.

Renjun texted him as they walked outside, on their way to lunch.

_hey jeno…….. bad news…… it looks like we have to reshoot everything from friday. would you be free again this friday? we really need to get it done this week if we want to stay on schedule_

_I think that should work. Did something go wrong?_

_just a stupid error on our part…… sorry to bother you again_

_It’s okay. I’ll see you Friday then._

\---

Renjun did not see Jeno on Friday.

He woke up that morning to a text that had arrived at four AM. It had been three hours since. Groggily, he swiped open his screen and read:

_Hey. I don’t think I can come tomorrow. I had kind of a rough night. I need this afternoon to get my homework done for my five o’clock class._

_what?? are you sure?????_

A few minutes later:

_Yeah. I’m sorry._

_could you maybe do this weekend then??_

_I can’t. I’m going home for the weekend._

Renjun’s thumbs hovered above the keyboard.

If he was being completely honest with himself, he was annoyed. If they didn’t shoot this before next week, they would have nothing to show in class, and that would not look good in front of the professor. Not to mention the danger of putting shoots off for too long -- they would have too little time to edit during the second half of the semester.

Finally, he typed:

_if you don’t want to be part of the project anymore, you can just tell me_

_It’s not like that, Renjun._

_did i do something?? is it because of me??_

_Of course not. I just need today for myself, okay? I’m really sorry I fucked things up for you._

Renjun glanced back up to Jeno’s first message. Sent at 4:06 AM.

_are you okay?_

_I’m fine. If you need to get someone else for the project, then go ahead. I won’t be offended or anything._

_no. i’ll wait for you. we’ll shoot next week._

_did you not sleep at all last night?_

_Okay. I’ll see you next week then._

Renjun broke the news to his group that morning, when they met for breakfast together in the dining hall by the tech institute.

“Well, that’s great,” Soomi said, dropping her spoon into her bowl of cereal with a clatter. “What are we supposed to do now if we don’t have an actor?”

“I told him we’d just wait till next week.” Renjun stared dejectedly into his glass of apple juice, not willing to meet their eyes. Even though Jeno had been the one to back out, it felt like his own fuck-up. Donghyuck had been right. It had been a mistake to ask Jeno onto the project in the first place.

“So we’re gonna have to squeeze in two shoots next week?” Jaeyoung asked, wide-eyed. “I don’t know how we’re going to manage -- it’s already difficult enough to schedule one of these things --”

“I know. I don’t know what else to do.”

“Maybe we should recast it,” Soomi suggested. “Or we should have run auditions in the first place, or something. Gotten a real actor.”

Renjun stood, accidentally bumping the edge of the table with his hip and making it shake. “I’m going to the bathroom,” he announced, squeezing out from his seat and practically sprinting towards the far side of the dining hall.

He stopped once he was tucked around the bathroom hallway corner, burying his face in his hands. It was a trainwreck. He wished that that trainwreck could have been only one derailed cart, and not every problem in his life stacked one on top of the other -- Jeno, his project, his friends. And worst of all, it was his own fault. He’d been the one to hitch those things together in the first place.

Donghyuck found him there, and let out a soft, sorry sigh. “Renjun,” he said, placing a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t get upset. Everything is going to be okay.”

“They’re all turning on me,” Renjun whispered.

“They are not. Everyone’s just a little high strung right now since it’s the middle of the semester. It’s not a huge deal. We’ll shoot next week and get back on track.”

“I should have listened to you before.” Renjun sniffed back the beginnings of tears, trying to hold himself together. “I never should have asked Jeno to do it.”

“ _Renjun.”_ Donghyuck pressed his palm to Renjun’s cheek. “Listen to me _now._ It’s no use getting all worked up. This is just a bump in the road. Everything will be okay. And if anyone’s ‘turned on you,’ I’ll beat them up. Now let’s go back to the table and talk things out properly.”

Renjun nodded, nerves beginning to calm. Donghyuck dragged him all the way back, fingers hooked in his sleeve.

Soomi was the first to speak, face earnest and apologetic. “I’m sorry for snapping at you, Renjun.” She held up a piece of paper, where she’d written _to-do_ at the top. “For now, let’s think of all the things we can get done in the meantime. No use in crying over spilled milk.”

Renjun, resolute, scooted his chair close to the table, and they began to brainstorm.

\---

When they finally _did_ shoot, it was not exactly a cheerful affair. Going through the entire sequence again was so tedious that Renjun could feel his muscles vibrating as he forced himself through the motions. He wanted to break into a sprint, do a cartwheel, anything to break up the monotony, but he had to focus, otherwise they were all going to lose their minds.

Jeno was especially quiet. His eyes were ringed by dark circles as if he hadn’t slept in a year, and every so often he would simply space out, and Renjun would have to call his name to bring him back into the present. He kept forgetting his lines, too, and would have to run back and double-check the script between every take.

They filmed the kiss again. Renjun didn’t even feel the jealous twinge this time. He’d become numb to it.

Once it was over (and thank God it was), they packed, and Jaeyoung and Soomi offered to carry the equipment back to the cage. Donghyuck sped off for a dinner date with Jaemin. That left Renjun and Jeno, who zipped their coats in awkward silence, without even a breeze to fill it in.

Jeno was finally the one to break it. “Hey, so… do you want to study for our philosophy midterm together?”

Renjun paused, taking Jeno in, his pale skin and mussed hair. Had he gotten thinner? Renjun couldn’t tell, since it had been awhile since they’d last seen each other in person. However, the thought alone was worrying.

“Sure. When?”

“How about tonight? I’m free at eight.”

Renjun figured it was meant to be an apology, for having to reschedule. He knew better by now than to think it was anything more.

“Okay. Where do you want to do it?”

“Your place?” Jeno suggested. “My room is kind of a mess right now.”

And so, Jeno arrived at Renjun’s dorm room door at eight PM precisely, knocking twice. Renjun let him in, standing aside for him to pass through, noticing the way his steps dragged while he slowed to look around.

“So this is your room,” Jeno said. “I’ve never been in this building before. It doesn't look much different from mine. Where’s your roommate?”

“Jamming out with his band, I suppose.”

Jeno walked over to Yukhei’s side of the room, examining his collage of posters. “These are… grim.”

“I wouldn’t get too close to his stuff. He wanted to curse you once. There might be some dangerous energy lingering over there.”

“Curse me?” Jeno backed away to what he determined was a safe distance from Yukhei’s loft.

“It’s a long story.” Renjun grabbed his philosophy textbook from his desk and plopped down in the center of the floor. “Come on. Let’s get through this.”

Jeno joined him, pulling his notes from his backpack and placing them on his lap. “Have you been studying on your own time, too?”

“Nope,” Renjun said, uncapping his pen with his teeth and getting a spot of blue ink on his bottom lip. He rubbed it off with his sleeve. “I’ve been avoiding it as long as possible. My brain doesn’t process this kind of stuff.”

“Do you need help with it?”

“Maybe.”

“Which part?”

“All of it.” Renjun flipped through the textbook’s pages, and it fanned his face. “I guess I’m no good at memorizing all the fallacies and biases and that kind of stuff.”

“Let’s go through those first, then.” Jeno reached back into his bag and pulled out a stack of index cards. “I made flashcards for them.”

Renjun smiled to himself. “You really haven’t changed at all. Still the perfect student.”

“I suppose.” Jeno began picking through his cards, slowly, as if trying to fill the time while he considered what he said next: “You know, I think the same thing about you every time I see you behind the camera. It reminds me of you and your little camcorder. Though you’ve certainly upgraded.”

Renjun felt a light switch on inside him, a flickering flame that burned below his heart. He wanted it to mean something. He wanted it so badly, he thought he might catch fire.

“Yeah? I bet you feel pretty silly for making fun of my little camcorder now,” he said, forcing himself to remain casual -- to not get his hopes up. “Now that you know I’m a filmmaking extraordinaire.”

Jeno didn’t laugh. His face was solemn as he said, “You know, I’m actually sort of jealous, looking back.”

“What do you mean?”

“I…” Jeno stopped fiddling with the cards. His hands gripped them loosely, uselessly. “I think about what it would have been like if I’d been the one with the camcorder. I have so many memories of my grandfather, but I don’t have any of them on film. Now, looking back on it, I wish I’d taken videos. I would ask him all kinds of questions, about his childhood or his job or his family. That way, I could still have them. Now that he’s gone, those memories died with him.” He froze, as if shocked at himself for saying too much. “I’m sorry. I really brought down the mood just now, huh?”

Renjun’s mouth hung open, at a loss for words.

“That was weird for me to say,” Jeno murmured, pressing a hand to his own forehead, as if checking to see if he had a fever.

“It wasn’t weird,” Renjun said, too loudly, trying to prove he meant it. “Really. I don’t mind if you feel like talking about your grandfather. I think that’s a nice idea -- having records of his life like that. It --”

“It wouldn’t have worked anyway. It’s not like he could remember anything. He wouldn’t have been able to answer any of the questions I asked him.”

Dead silence trickled in, flooding the room to its ceiling. They floated in the midst of it. Weightless, untethered to each other, lost at sea. Renjun felt as though if he tried to respond, only bubbles would come out of his mouth, clumsy and muddled, floating away to disappear unheard.

Gently, he reached forward and pried the cards from Jeno’s hand. “Do you want me to quiz you first?” he asked. The words made it through, miraculously. Perhaps it was because they were easy words. They smoothed things over, but did not fix them.

Jeno took a long breath in, as if he’d been deprived of air.

“Okay,” he said.

\---

In the evening after their final day of shooting, Donghyuck decided they should have a little party to celebrate. He invited them all over to his dorm (as well as their optional plus-ones), where they claimed the kitchen-slash-rec room on his floor. Jaemin arrived with bags on his arm from the store, and he and Donghyuck began to cook, making some stir fry concoction from the cheapest groceries they could acquire, true to the broke college kid lifestyle.

Soomi had invited her girlfriend, Hana, who wore her long blond hair in braids and drew her winged eyeliner with razor-sharp precision. She sat on the sofa with her legs thrown over Soomi’s lap, trying to take a cute selfie for her Instagram, as she was apparently a pretty famous model on there with several thousand followers. Jaeyoung, meanwhile, unzipped his bag and lifted out a case of beer with a wild grin, setting it on the table.

Donghyuck pointed his chopsticks at him. “You really want my RA to come in here and write us all up?”

“If we pour it into cups, it’ll look more innocuous.” He then proceeded to pull out a sleeve of plastic cups. “I’ve already got us covered.”

Donghyuck rolled his eyes, but was clearly a little excited at the prospect of a drink, and let it go.

Jeno walked in just as dinner was ready.

“Always just in time, huh?” Soomi observed.

Jeno removed his coat, and tossed it into their pile on the floor. “Yeah. I was studying, and I lost track of time.”

Renjun looked away. He’d practically had to beg Jeno to come, to the point where he’d started to feel guilty about it, like if Jeno _did_ come, he might fall behind on his work and tank his grades. At the same time, he didn’t think it seemed healthy for Jeno to spend so much time on his own, especially not after they’d studied together the last time -- it was clear that Jeno was bottling something up. Renjun hoped that, whatever was happening, inviting Jeno to their get-together might help him to get his mind off of it.

Donghyuck brought the pot over to the table and passed out plates. Once everyone had their food and a beer, Jaeyoung raised the latter, and said, “Cheers to us. We finished the hardest part of our project, and hopefully it’ll be smooth sailing from here on out.”

Everyone clinked plastic cups, and drank. Renjun had nearly turned the alcohol away, remembering his last experience with it, but Jaeyoung had not brought enough beer for anyone to get seriously drunk, so he decided it would be okay.

“Jeno,” said Hana, leaning out over the table to meet his eye. “So. How was kissing my girlfriend? Did she get your heart racing?”

Jeno laughed softly. “I don’t know about that. But I’ll give her a solid six out of ten.”

Soomi, offended, whacked him on the arm with the back of her hand. “Hey! I’m a world-class smoocher. Clearly, you just don’t know a good kiss when you get one.”

“I don’t know about that. It was kind of like kissing a wall.”

Soomi’s jaw dropped, and Hana was so tickled that she fell back onto the couch, clutching her stomach as she giggled uncontrollably.

Renjun had to smile at it. It was reassuring to see that Jeno got along well with his teammates, and that he didn’t feel too out of place among them. He took a bite of his stir fry, any misgivings he might have had squashed, perfectly content with the present company. The atmosphere was warm, lined with laughter, the evening light spilling in through the window making it fuzzy and golden.

Somehow, the conversation had turned to high school. Jaemin was describing how he and Donghyuck had met in their algebra class during their freshman year, a story involving adjacent seats and a dropped pencil.

“Donghyuck was terrible at math,” Jaemin said. “He was always asking me for help. I’m still not convinced he wasn’t faking it.”

“Listen, I was a drama kid. You think I gave two shits about solving equations?”

“No way,” Hana said. “I was a drama kid too!”

Donghyuck reached over and high-fived her. “Great minds think alike. Any other drama kids? What about you, Renjun?”

“Nah,” he responded, shaking his head. “Not a drama kid.”

“Math whiz? Teacher’s pet?”

Renjun went to answer, but Jeno beat him to it. “None of the above. He was a film nerd, even back then.”

Renjun looked at him, surprised. Jeno only gave him a gentle, closed-lip smile in response.

“You two knew each other in high school?” Soomi asked. “I had no idea. I thought you must have met at Hanyang, since Renjun is from China.”

“I stayed a summer in Korea,” Renjun said. “We were next-door neighbors.”

“Aww, cute.” Hana pressed her hands together, face dreamy. “It’s nice that the two of you managed to stay friends all these years. Were you penpals or something?”

A piece of broccoli nearly went down the wrong pipe. Renjun spluttered, thumping his chest with a fist. “You could say that,” he managed, after a successful swallow.

“What about Jeno? What was he like back then?”

“He was Mr. Popular.” Renjun gave Jeno a devilish grin. “Captain of the soccer team, perfect grades. The most straight-laced kid you’ve ever met.”

“Really?” Jeno smirked. “Is that how you remember it? I wasn’t _totally_ straight-laced.”

“Name one rebellious thing you did.”

Jeno cocked his brow, but didn’t say anything, waiting.

_Oh._

_I suppose getting handsy with the boy next-door while his parents weren’t home qualifies._

Renjun hoped no one noticed his blush, and declared, “I stand by my point. And you’re just the same way now. A total overachiever.”

Jeno, in an act of modern day rebellion, squeezed Renjun’s side, making him reel and nearly spill his beer. Renjun retaliated by shoving Jeno further down the couch with his foot. The others laughed, and it filled the room.

At some point, Jeno got up to go to the bathroom, and the first thing Soomi did once he shut the door behind him was lean in and say in a hushed voice, “Wow. Renjun, did I miss something?”

“What do you mean?” he asked, taking a slow, suspicious sip.

“I mean, I could feel the flirtatious energy from way over here. Are you two… you know…” She made a hand gesture that would be considered rude at most dinner parties.

“No,” Renjun said quickly. “Nothing like that.”

“Oh, come on. You’re telling me there’s nothing there?” She turned to Hana for a second opinion. “Am I crazy? Are you getting the same vibe I am?”

Hana nodded. “Oh yeah. Definitely some sexual tension going on on that side of the room.”

Donghyuck gave Renjun a tired glance that said, _are you going to say it, or am I?_

Renjun sighed, and gave him a subtle nod as the go-ahead. Clearly, there was no use in trying to hide it.

“They’re exes,” Donghyuck explained. “So that’s the vibe you’re picking up on.”

Soomi’s lips went round in a surprised _o._ “Well. That completely changes my perception and understanding of the last several weeks. Why didn’t you tell us, Renjun?”

“I don’t know,” he said, rubbing his forehead. “I don’t really want to talk about it. It’s complicated.”

Soomi’s mouth went even rounder. “Are you still into him?”

Jaeyoung jumped in, having put the pieces together. “Is that why you asked him to be our actor? Because you still like him?”

Renjun’s heart sank.

And it plummeted even further, thudding painfully somewhere in the dark, when he turned and saw Jeno standing by the door. He did not know how long he had been listening for, but the somber expression on his face said he had heard enough.

Everyone was quiet. No laughter, no whispers.

“I’m gonna get going,” Jeno said. He grabbed his coat from the pile.

“Jeno -- “ Renjun stood, as if he might run over, but it was like his feet were glued to the ground. “I’ll see you.”

Jeno was not spiteful. Of course not -- he was forgiving as always, kinder than Renjun deserved. “I’ll see you,” he said, and walked out the door.

\---

In late October, Renjun decided to visit his uncle’s for the weekend. He’d wanted to do it all year, but projects had kept him on campus to make the most of his time. However, with their film back on track, Renjun didn’t think a weekend away from the labs would hurt too much. He needed some time to clear his head, anyway.

It certainly didn’t have anything to do with the fact that he knew Jeno went home every other weekend. It was pure coincidence, he told himself, that they would be there at the same time. Just a stroke of luck.

When he dropped his bag on his bed in the spare room, he glanced out his window, across his uncle’s yard to where Jeno’s house sat. It seemed everything had gone unchanged in the past few years. The grass was ever so slightly overgrown, tickling the edges of the stone wall and the legs of the swing. He saw Jeno’s cat slinking around the house’s corner, tail curled like a question mark as it ducked beneath the rose bush, which still had a few pink blossoms clinging to its branches.

Renjun sent Jeno a text.

_hey!! i’m at my uncle’s today and tomorrow…… if you’re at home too we should hang out_

He didn’t really expect a response. He knew he’d fucked things up. But it was worth one more shot.

He slipped his phone into his pocket, and went downstairs.

His uncle had already placed the teapot on the stove, and was rooting around in the cupboards for cups. Like everything in his house, none of his cups matched, and the two he produced seemed to come from different eras, one a delicate teacup with a flower petal pattern around its rim and a thin handle that seemed far too breakable to be practical, and the other a hefty mug with the words “Hanyang University College of Humanities Team Building Exercise 2011” smushed together on its front.

Renjun sat down at the kitchen table. That wooden duck was still on the table runner, its lacquered eyes gleaming in the noontime light from the window. “I thought we got rid of this,” he murmured.

“I couldn’t bear to part with him. I ended up digging him back out of the boxes before we got rid of them.”

“This is why your girlfriend doesn’t wanna move in. You have too much stuff.”

His uncle chuckled. “That’s probably right. Though I don’t think tossing the duck will convince her. He’s been around longer than her, anyway. I think he deserves to stay in the house he knows and loves.” He walked around the table and set the mug and a teabag (jasmine, Renjun’s favorite) in front of him. “Speaking of which, how are things going with you this semester? Got a boyfriend yet?”

Renjun blushed. “I don’t like the way you just went ahead and assumed it would be a boy.”

“Am I wrong?”

“No. You’re not wrong.”

His uncle produced a canister of pirouline from beneath the kitchen cabinets and held it out to him. “Here. Eat some cookies.”

“How long have you had these?” Renjun asked skeptically.

“Ages. But they were never opened. I think they’re still good.”

Renjun took the canister and pried the lid off. He popped the end of a pirouline into his mouth and sucked at the cookie part to reach the chocolate underneath.

“No boyfriend, then?” his uncle asked.

“No,” Renjun admitted. He bit down, and the pirouline split with a crack.

“Not even Jeno?”

From the stove, the teapot erupted in a scream.

His uncle went to retrieve it, killing the heat and bringing the pot back over to fill their cups.

“No,” Renjun said. “It’s complicated.”

“Things always seem complicated when you’re young,” his uncle assured him, tipping the teapot. The hot water rose to the lip of Renjun’s mug. “It’s probably much simpler than you realize.”

Renjun had never much thought of his uncle as a romantic, but he _did_ have several decades more experience than Renjun himself, so maybe there was some truth to what he was saying. Maybe Renjun was simply overthinking the whole thing. “I don’t know. I tried to get back together with him last semester, but he turned me down. And now we’ve been working together on my film this semester, and we get along so well, or we at least did for a while… I just don’t get it. I don’t get why he doesn’t like me.”

“It might not be about you,” his uncle said. He watched, pensive, as the color from his teabag flooded his cup, turning it a misty golden-green. “Jeno is a busy boy. And the last few years haven’t been easy for him. If he were in a better place, maybe he wouldn’t have rejected you.”

“But when he _did_ reject me --” Renjun leaned forward on his forearms, jarring the table. His tea rippled in its mug. “He said that we’d over-romanticized things. That we’d invested too much in something that wasn’t really anything at all. Just a summer fling.”

His uncle, unexpectedly, smiled. “Do you really believe he meant that?”

“I --” Renjun froze. He’d convinced himself of it so thoroughly, that considering the opposite was strange and impossible-seeming. Why would Jeno have said it if he hadn’t meant it? Why would Jeno try so hard to keep him at arm’s length if he loved him?

“It seems to me,” his uncle said, “that Jeno is a boy who doesn’t like to rely on other people. He’s the caretaker, not the one to be cared for. And that can be a dangerous mindset. It forces you to drive people away when you need them the most. Because you’re afraid they might think you’re weak.”

“I don’t think he’s weak.” He’d never thought it, not once. Jeno was one of the strongest people he knew. He never complained, even when he had every right to. Renjun had only ever seen him cry once, after his grandfather’s stroke, and even that had been coaxed out of him. “And even if he was weak or sad or needed someone to rely on, it wouldn’t change anything. I would still love him, no matter what.”

“Maybe you ought to tell him that.” His uncle took a long sip from his tea, and it seemed to fill him, lifting his ribs and relaxing his shoulders like a cure to a tired Saturday afternoon. “Maybe he’s just been waiting for your permission.”

Renjun took a sip, too, searching for the solace in it, carefully turning his uncle’s words over in his brain.

When he checked his phone, Jeno had responded.

_I don’t know if I can. I’ve got homework to do. Maybe some other time._

\---

Renjun lay in his bed.

It was ten o’clock, and he was waiting for sleep to find him. He and his uncle had spent the evening watching those old Chinese dramas on VHS, which Renjun had poo-pooed as a teen but, as it turned out, were actually kind of fascinating, in all their cheesy glory. More than that, though, his uncle had been delighted when Renjun was the one to suggest them. Renjun decided that letting people share what they loved with you was a special thing. The sort of thing you would regret not doing once they were gone.

He thought of what Jeno had said to him.

_I wish I’d taken videos. I would ask him all kinds of questions, about his childhood or his job or his family. That way, I could still have them. Now that he’s gone, those memories died with him._

Renjun tossed and turned in his bed. There was no finding sleep when his thoughts were churning in a whirlpool. He wanted to say something to Jeno -- he’d tried earlier, when he’d texted him back, but he’d never gotten a response. He wanted to find the right words to ease his mind. He didn’t want Jeno to be afraid of his own vulnerability.

_I wish I’d taken videos._

Renjun lurched upright. He stumbled over the side of his bed, wrapping his blanket around his shoulders, and raced to his desk, so fast he banged his shin on the leg of it and had to cradle it as he settled into the chair.

_Videos._

He flipped open his laptop, and got to work.

\---

An hour later, he stood in Jeno’s backyard, searching along the ground for a rock of suitable size. Big enough to make a loud ding, small enough that it wouldn’t shatter the glass.

He found one, the size of an acorn. He took an anticipatory step back, then snapped his arm forward, tossing the rock so that it hit the edge of Jeno’s bedroom window. It did not produce the noise he’d wanted. He began searching again -- maybe he needed a bigger rock.

His second try was more successful. This time, it struck right in the middle of the glass, making it reverberate with a noisy clang. He waited a few seconds, and then Jeno was pushing open the window, staring down at him with an incredulous expression.

“Why the hell are you throwing rocks at my window at eleven PM?”

“Were you sleeping?”

“No. That doesn’t justify it, though.”

Renjun placed his hands on his hips, staunch and unmoving. “You wouldn’t respond to my texts. I had to get your attention somehow.”

“You could have knocked on our front door like a normal person.”

“I was going for a Romeo and Juliet kind of vibe. ‘By yonder blessed moon,’ and all that jazz.”

“Didn’t know you were a fan of the stage.”

“Theater and film are adjacent artforms.”

Renjun thought he could see the hint of a smile on Jeno’s lips in the dark. “Do I _have_ to be Juliet? Can’t I be Romeo instead?”

“Nope. It’s a purely altitudinal distinction, and right now, _I’m_ looking up at _you_.” Renjun found another rock by his feet, and held it up. “Get down here and talk to me, or else I’ll start my second barrage.”

Jeno sighed and shut his window. A minute later, he came out through the back door, leaning on it to close it. “What do you want, Renjun?”

“Come on a walk with me. I want to talk to you for a little bit. And I have a gift for you.”

“I’m in my pajamas,” Jeno said, pointing down at his plaid bottoms.

“Me too. It’s not like anyone’s gonna see us. It’s too dark.”

It was, in fact, too dark, perhaps even too dark to be taking a walk at all, but they trailed along the side of the road anyway. Not a single car passed by, no flashing headlights or humming engines, leaving them the peaceful quiet of the night. The only noise was the slight stirring of the wind in the grass and the crooning of crickets. The stars were out, just as they’d been on the night they’d eaten ice cream by the student union and Jeno had let him down as gently he could. But Renjun didn’t take it as a bad sign. He thought, maybe, he could make those stars mean something else this time. He’d turn them around, make them the perfect set dressing for a memory worth retelling.

He and Jeno swerved down the path into the forest. Even after all that time, Renjun thought he could navigate it by feeling alone. He didn’t need light when he had the imprint of the path burned onto his heart.

“Renjun,” Jeno said. “What was it you wanted? It’s getting late --”

Renjun stopped walking abruptly, and turned to face him. From inside his jacket, he pulled out a thin jewel case with a DVD inside, and held it out.

“This is for you,” he said.

Jeno took it, peering down at it curiously, trying to make out if there was any writing on it, though it was too dark to see. “What is it?”

“You said you wished you had videos of your grandpa. I know this isn’t exactly what you’d meant… but I went through all those videos I took when I was here for the summer. I found all the clips I got of you and your grandfather, and I put them together and burnt them on a disc. That way, you can watch them, and remember.”

Jeno’s eyes were round with astonishment. “What?”

“I didn’t have a ton of footage, so it’s not too long, but... and I wasn’t trying to overstep, so I hope you don’t think it was weird of me --”

“It’s not weird,” Jeno whispered. “It’s amazing.” For a split second, Renjun thought he might have seen the beginnings of tears pricking in Jeno’s eyes, but he must have swallowed them back. “You didn’t have to do that, Renjun.”

“I wanted to,” Renjun told him. “You seemed so sad lately, and I wanted to try and make it better. I know I can’t fix it. But I thought that this might help, even just a little.” He bit his lip, puffed his cheeks -- his focusing face, as Jeno had called it -- while he worked up the right words to say. “The thing is, I didn’t totally understand how you felt. You never told me you were sad. I had to figure it out on my own, and maybe it took too long, because I’m selfish and dumb and slow to pick up on that kind of thing. But I want you to know that you can tell me when you’re sad. I won’t think you’re a burden. I won’t think you’re weak. I won’t laugh or poke fun. I’ll try to help. Or, if you don’t want me to help, I’ll just listen. Because I want to be someone you can share things with.” Then he added, firmly, so there was no mistake about it, “I love you, and that won’t change, no matter what it is that you’re going through. You can rely on me, one hundred percent.”

The light shifted. Above their heads, the moon peaked above the trees, raining its beam down on them so they could see each other in proper relief.

Jeno’s arms were around Renjun’s waist the next second, and his mouth on Renjun’s mouth. The kiss was so unexpected that Renjun felt it like a full-body shiver, every hair on end, every cell screaming exhilaration from head to toe. There was no question of kissing him back, because Renjun had waited so long for this moment that he would not waste it. He slung his arms around Jeno’s neck, keeping him close, capturing another kiss when the first one faded. It felt just like a movie, built on years of bitter work, but seemingly effortless as it played out. All the scenery in place, the lighting just right, every detail in perfect focus.

He would never let go of that feeling. Never, ever again. He wondered how he had been able to live without it.

Jeno pulled back, licked his lips, and said, “Sorry. That was an impulse.”

“It was a good impulse,” Renjun assured him, and drew him back in for another kiss.

\---

They walked back with their hands linked, ambling slowly along the white line that marked the road’s edge.

“Tell me,” Renjun said, “what’s been the matter this semester. When you cancelled on us -- what happened?”

Jeno watched the ground, placing his feet carefully as if the road line was a tightrope. “I, uh… I’ve been having issues for a while. Ever since after you went back to China in high school.”

“Oh.” _By which he means, ‘around the time I started to ghost you.’_ Renjun knew there had been a reason for it, and it had had to do with his grandfather’s death, though he had not entirely understood it. “What kind of issues?”

“Anxiety,” Jeno said. “That’s what my counselor at Hanyang says. I guess I kind of always felt that way. But it got really bad after he died. I would start thinking about what that must have been like for him -- forgetting everything, even his family. By the end, he didn’t even know who I was. He called my mom by her mother’s name once, and I found her crying in her bedroom.” He ran his free hand over his face, as if trying to hide. “Anyway, I started thinking about how that might happen to my mom someday, because Alzheimer’s is hereditary. So maybe I’ll have to take care of her someday, too. And I hate to think of her not being like herself anymore. And then --” His feet moved even slower, as if he feared falling from the narrow thread of the line. “I think about how I could get it, too. When I’m old. And how I would start to forget my family and whoever I end up marrying or whatever.” He laughed, as if it was some ridiculous notion. “I would just spiral like that, thinking about all this stuff that could happen. I know it sounds silly --”

“It doesn’t sound silly,” Renjun asserted. “So don’t say that. There’s nothing wrong with feeling that way.”

Jeno gave his hand an appreciative squeeze. “Well. When I got to college, it got worse. Because it wasn’t just that stuff, but classes and exams and having to make new friends and… I just suck at handling it. So that night I cancelled on you, I’d kind of gotten myself all worked up. A panic attack. I couldn’t fall asleep for the rest of the night.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t kinder to you,” Renjun murmured. “I shouldn’t have tried to make you feel guilty about it.”

“It’s okay. I probably just seemed like a massive flake, huh?” Jeno looked up, away from the road, and offered Renjun a gentle smile. “That day, I finally broke down and emailed the counseling office. So I see a lady there every week. It helps a little, I think.”

“That’s good.” Jeno’s house was coming into view on the horizon. The downstairs light was still on. “Have you told your parents about any of this?”

“No,” Jeno said. “It just feels weird to talk to them about. It feels weird to talk to _anyone_ about.”

“I think you should tell them.” Renjun stopped as they stepped onto Jeno’s front lawn, placing his hands on Jeno’s shoulders. “Maybe not right now. But someday. It might make you feel better if you can be open with them about it.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” Jeno glanced warily at his front door, as if dreading having to approach it. “Thanks for listening to me. And thank you for this.” He patted the pocket of his hoodie, where the DVD lay inside.

“No problem.” Renjun tip-toed, and gave Jeno a goodnight kiss. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Okay?”

“Okay,” Jeno said.

They parted, and Renjun slipped inside as quietly as he could, not wanting to make a racket at close to midnight. It did not matter, because his uncle was still awake, sitting in his armchair, wearing a smirk illuminated by lamplight.

“Have a nice nighttime rendezvous?” he asked.

“I did.”

“Did it involve the boy next door?”

Renjun returned his smile. “It might have.”

“And did it have a happy ending?”

“I think so.”

His uncle tipped his glasses down, eyes glinting smartly. “Go to bed now, Renjun.”

Renjun scampered up the stairs, impatient to fall asleep just so he could wake up tomorrow and meet Jeno at the gate of his uncle’s yard.

\---

Jeno’s father offered to drive the both of them back to Hanyang the next day. Jeno sat in the passenger’s seat, and every few minutes, Renjun could feel him looking at him from the corner of his eye. Each glance thrilled Renjun, as if the car was zooming over hills and he was in free fall beneath his seatbelt, filling him with butterflies.

They stopped at the lot on Renjun’s side of the campus first. He got out and slung his bag over his shoulder. From the front seat, Jeno rolled down his window.

“I’ll see you,” he said.

“Yeah.” Renjun wanted to lean down and kiss him, only his father was right there, so he thought better of it and instead tapped his fingers awkwardly against the side of the car, because he wanted an excuse to not walk away. He wanted to linger. Or, he wanted Jeno to get out and come with him up to his room and make out with him for the rest of the afternoon. But instead, Renjun showed his restraint and tore himself away from the car, casting one last wave over his shoulder before heading inside.

Yukhei was sitting at his desk and, miraculously, doing his homework. Renjun shuffled in and shut the door quietly so as not to bother him, but Yukhei whipped around anyway and said, “Whoa. What happened to you?”

“Pardon?”

“You’re practically glowing.”

Renjun’s lip quirked. “Thanks, I guess.”

“Did something good happen?”

“You can tell?” Renjun set his bags down beside his loft and crawled up his ladder, flopping down onto his mattress. It was funny, he thought, how when he was sad, all he wanted to do was lay in bed, and now that he was happy, he wanted it, too. He wanted to lay there, stare up at his ceiling, and think about his happiness. He wanted to bask in it, dream about it, hold onto it and never let it go.

“Of course I can tell,” Yukhei said. “I’m very observant. Did you get laid or something?”

“No. But maybe someday soon. Me and my ex got back together.”

Yukhei broke into a huge grin. “That’s rad as hell. Where’s my thank you?”

“What ‘thank you?’”

“For all the advice I gave you. Remember?”

Renjun snorted into his pillow. _Leave it to Yukhei to think he’d done something when he’d really had nothing to do with it whatsoever._ “You are overstating your importance.”

“But I was so helpful! I read your tarot and everything!”

Renjun had forgotten about the tarot. He remembered Death as he’d flipped it over, looking into the gaunt skull of its face, not knowing what it meant but anticipating the worst.

 _It’s the card of endings,_ Yukhei said. _But it can be the card of change too._

Renjun decided he would not be fearful of changes to come. After all, who was to say that a change couldn’t be a new beginning?

\---

Soomi sat leaned in close to the computer screen, nose nearly touching it, its light reflecting in her glasses.

“You’re gonna go blind,” Donghyuck warned her. “That’s bad for your eyes.”

“I’m already pretty much blind, so it doesn’t really matter,” she said. “The timeline is too small -- I can barely see what I’m clicking on.”

Donghyuck tapped the plus key on her keyboard. The timeline beneath the video previewer expanded.

“Ah.” She backed up, and blinked hard to readjust her vision. “Let’s pretend I knew how to do that.”

“Sure.”

They’d been in the post-production lab for an hour as Soomi began editing. They’d spent that time choosing their favorite shots from the camera reel and trying to decide where the best frames to cut on were. Renjun was glad not to be in Soomi’s shoes, because he could barely navigate Premiere. Just the other day in class, he’d been trying to figure out how to track a movement and, in classically Renjun-esque fashion, had accidentally deleted all his files. His professor had assured him that that was not possible, except his files were definitely gone, so he’d had to start over from scratch and had spent a total of eight straight hours at his computer station, not returning to his dorm until one in the morning.

Suffice it to say that he was restless to be there again, pacing up and down the aisles, shoving a wafer cookie into his mouth as a substitute for dinner. Silently, he cursed the basement level vending machines. They made it too easy to skip meals.

“Renjun,” Jaeyoung called. He was lying across one of the couches at the back of the room, phone lifted above his face. “You’re making me anxious. Why don’t you just sit down?”

“I can’t. My brain is on fire.”

“That’s troubling.”

“You can leave, you know.” Soomi swiveled to face Renjun, propping her chin on her palm. “I think I’ve got a hold on what I’m doing now, so if you guys wanna get out of here, I can just do the rest on my own.”

“Really?” Renjun finally stopped pacing.

“Sure. Plus, you’ll drive me crazy if you stick around any longer. So please. Go home and sleep.”

Renjun did not need to be told twice. He grabbed his bag and sprinted out of the lab, pushing open the loading dock doors next to the equipment cage. It was cool out now, autumn in full effect, with the pavement a slightly darker gray than usual on account of some evening rain that must have cleared up just before he came outside. Renjun realized that in just a couple weeks, that rain would become snow, and his first year of college would come to an end. It was thrilling and nerve-wracking all at once.

He took out his phone and texted Jeno.

_JENO!!!!!!!!! i am free!!!!!!_

_Really? Did you get everything done?_

_yes!!!!! and i am starving!!!!!!!!! have you eaten dinner yet??_

_No. If you want, we could order something for delivery and eat at my place._

Renjun slowed down, before he could get too far along on his side of campus. He’d never been to Jeno’s place before -- he’d never been invited. Since they were dating now, it was an inevitability. It made him giddy with curiosity, to see where Jeno lived. There was a certain intimacy to seeing someone’s bedroom for the first time, and not even in just a sexy way.

_i will be there in no more than five minutes!!!!! which res hall again??_

_Res Hall A. I’ll meet you in the downstairs lobby._

Renjun resumed his sprint, turning in the opposite direction, where he could see the tall brick buildings of the southside residence halls in the distance.

When he arrived, Jeno was downstairs as promised. They entered the elevator, and Jeno hit the button for the fourth floor.

“So how’s your project going?” Jeno asked. He was wearing his glasses today, and attempting to flatten his hair using the reflective metal of the elevator door as a mirror. Renjun suspected he’d just woken from a nap, and was happy to see it -- at least he knew Jeno was sleeping these days.

“It’s good. Soomi is editing right now, and then we’ll be doing last-chance critiques next week.”

“What happens after that?”

“Well, we screen it. Every film student is required to screen their film in front of the whole major during finals week.”

“Sounds intimidating.”

Renjun shrugged. “I guess it is. But I think I prefer that to having to take a final exam or something.”

They stepped out of the elevator, making their way down the hall towards Jeno’s room.

“By the way,” Renjun said. “How are you doing? With your exams coming up, I mean.” He knew that, with how hard Jeno worked himself, the prospect of finals was dangerous. He was afraid of what might happen, if Jeno stopped taking care of himself again.

“It’s alright. I think I can manage it.” Jeno slotted his key into his door’s lock, and pushed it open with his shoulder. “Sorry -- it’s still kind of a mess, but I’ve been trying to clean it up.”

Renjun walked in. It _was_ a little messy (he had never considered that Jeno might be a messy person -- it seemed natural that he should be meticulous), but certainly no worse than Yukhei’s half of their room. He could see the shadow of its former disaster-state: there were three full garbage bags against the wall, waiting to be taken out, and a collection of empty soda cans stacked in the corner. Jeno’s desk was overrun with papers and books, so thoroughly covered that the desktop itself could not be seen underneath, and on the wall above, he had a mini-whiteboard where he’d drawn a work schedule for himself. It was so crowded that Renjun could barely decipher it; he stepped closer, and picked out, “CHEM EXAM TUESDAY,” “LAB DUE -- 10 PAGE MINIMUM,” and “CLASS, 2- 4, GYM, 4 - 5, DINNER, 5 - 5:30, STUDYING, 5:30 - 10.” Apparently, he _was_ meticulous in some ways. Renjun could not imagine micromanaging himself like that -- he lived his own life by the seat of his pants.

He glanced to the other side of the room. The loft frame and mattress were there, but no bed sheets or belongings. “Where’s your roommate?” Renjun asked.

“He dropped out at the end of last semester,” Jeno explained. “So it’s just me now.”

“Oh.” Somehow, that made it worse. Renjun pictured Jeno at his desk, sitting among all his books and assignments, completely alone without even a roommate for company. Jeno, forcing himself to study even though his mind was somewhere else, and getting frustrated at his own inability to make progress. Jeno, thinking how nice it might be to go outside or meet up with his friends, but not allowing himself to, because he had too much work to do. Jeno, missing his grandfather and his family, and not telling anybody about it, for fear of sounding weak.

“Well,” Renjun said. “I guess that just means I can bother you all the time. My new goal is to come hang out at least three times a week. So mark that on your calendar. It is non-optional.”

Jeno smiled, walked to his whiteboard, and squeezed in, “RENJUN TIME - 3 DAYS PER WEEK.”

“Great. Now let’s get dinner. I’m dying of starvation.”

They ordered a pizza and pulled chairs up to Jeno’s former roommate’s abandoned desk, using it like a dinner table. After Renjun ate half the pizza entirely on his own (he was _really, really_ hungry), he offered to help Jeno clean out the rest of his trash, hefting two of the garbage bags over his shoulder just prove how capable he was, only to stumble and drop them in the middle of the hall, one of them spilling open across the floor. This might have been an annoyance except it made Jeno laugh so hard he had to lean back against the wall to support himself, so Renjun didn’t much mind. Anything for just one of Jeno’s laughs.

Once clean-up was over, they curled up on Jeno’s bed and searched for a movie to watch on Netflix. Jeno scrolled his finger along his laptop’s trackpad, except Renjun kept bumping it out of the way as they argued over their ideas.

“Ooh! Ooh ooh! This one --” Renjun said, dragging the cursor to it. “I’ve heard of this one. It’s supposed to be really good.”

“I dunno, seems kinda boring to me.”

“It’s not boring! It’s a contemplative, slow-paced drama.”

“Yawn.”

Renjun smacked Jeno on the arm.

Eventually, they settled on a rom-com, propping the laptop on the bureau at the bed’s end so they could stretch out. As it turned out, it didn’t really matter what movie they chose, because Renjun was hardly watching it. Instead, he was snuggling as close into Jeno’s side as he could, breathing in the scent of laundry detergent on his shirt, thinking about the time they’d lain on the hammock and feeling as though he was reliving it. That memory would never die, he thought, so long as the warmth of Jeno’s body was there to remind him of it.

“Renjun,” Jeno scolded. “You aren’t even paying attention.”

“Yeah I am. The lady just got a job at the patisserie --”

“No, she didn’t. She got _fired_ from the patisserie.”

“Same difference.”

“Do you even know her name?”

“Yeah. You know. She’s, uh… Lady. Main Lady.”

Jeno snorted. There it was, the beginning of another laugh, and Renjun melted, unable to hold himself together. He stopped pretending to watch the movie, and pressed a kiss to the underside of Jeno’s jaw, slow and lingering. Jeno gave a little shiver, and Renjun kissed him again, at the curve of his neck.

Then, impatient, Jeno rolled over top of Renjun, hands cradling his face, and kissed him on the lips. The rush was so intense that Renjun let out a small moan against Jeno’s mouth, back arching, hands searching to find purchase in Jeno’s hair. That little moan must have driven Jeno wild, because he kissed Renjun harder, fingers slipping beneath his shirt, molding to the curve of Renjun’s ribs, their heat electric.

Finally, Renjun said _fuck it_ and broke the kiss so he could peel his shirt off over his head, tossing it over the bedside to the ground.

“Not so shy anymore, huh?” Jeno asked.

It took Renjun a moment to register, but when he did, he started to giggle. Jeno laughed, too, making his kisses tickle as he trailed them down Renjun’s chest.

\---

“Leave it to your boyfriend to be late,” Donghyuck chided, peering around the back of the theater.

“Oh, give him a break.” Renjun pinched Donghyuck’s arm, making the other boy whine. “Unlike us, he has actual exams to attend. I bet he’s on his way right now.”

“Besides,” Soomi pitched in. “It’s not like he’s required to attend screenings. He isn’t a film student.”

“Yeah,” Jaeyoung added. “Show a little patience. What are you, five?”

“Since when did I become the butt of the joke in this group?” Donghyuck, indignant, threw his feet up onto the empty chair in front of him and crossed his arms. “I liked it better when we all picked on each other equally.”

One of their professors walked in through the side entrances, noticed Donghyuck’s propped feet, and called, “Please show a little respect for the facilities, Lee Donghyuck.”

Renjun, Soomi, and Jaeyoung cackled. Donghyuck, face glowing red, drew his feet back to the floor.

It was the day of their film screening. The theater was filled with their professors and peers, all at the edge of their seats to see what kinds of output their major had produced that semester. He could see Dongyoung and the rest of his film crew, sitting near the front -- his film would be screening that day, too. He turned and gave Renjun a wave. At the back of the room, the tech engineer was loading up the program; while waiting to start, the projector threw the Hanyang University logo onto the large screen. Renjun shut one eye and traced the blue circle with his index finger, remembering the first time he’d seen that logo three years ago. He was glad Heejin had led him down into the tech institute basement, glad he’d ultimately had the courage to follow his gut and attend. It felt fated, and it felt perfect.

His phone dinged in his pocket. It was his mother, who had sent a text which read: _Good luck at your screening sweetie! Can’t wait for you to show us your film when you get home!_ Renjun couldn’t wait, either; he was so pleased that his mother was showing an interest in his work that it made him want to jump on a plane right then and fly straight home.

Just as the lights flickered to show they were about to start, the door flew open again and Jeno came racing down, pushing past the people already in the row to where Renjun sat.

“Hey,” he said, breathless. “I didn’t miss anything yet, did I?”

“Nope, just starting.” Renjun moved his coat from the seat he’d been saving. “How was your exam?”

“Good, I think.” He was smiling, and it seemed genuine. Renjun had done his best to help Jeno study for the past couple of weeks, even though he knew nothing about the subjects. He’d been in charge of holding up flashcards and double-checking facts from textbooks. It looked as though it had paid off. “How about you? Are you nervous?”

“Not really,” Renjun said. “I’m happy with how it came out. And even if no one likes it, I learned a lot making it, so I guess that’s what really matters.”

Donghyuck leaned across Renjun and tapped Jeno on the shoulder. “Really, _you_ should be the nervous one. It’s your face that’s gonna be up there on the screen.”

Jeno frowned. “Somehow I did not consider that.”

“Don’t worry,” Soomi called from down the row. “We’re in this together.”

There was a hush passed around the room as the lights went all the way down. Renjun leaned his head against Jeno’s shoulder, taking a deep breath in through his nose to prepare himself. Jeno’s hand found his on top of the armrest, lacing their fingers, and Renjun knew that no matter how his screening went, it didn’t really matter; as far as he was concerned, he’d already gotten his happy ending.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompter -- i don't know who you are yet, but i hope you're happy with what i came up with!! i'm so thankful to you for giving me the idea to get the ball rolling!! in the end, this fic ended up being personal to me in a lot of ways -- i've been both the renjun and the jeno of this story. 
> 
> hanyang university is, in fact, a real school, though i've never been there, of course. the vast majority of the stuff about the campus and classes is made up, though there is a kernel of truth in there somewhere -- at the very least, hanyang DOES have a film program. this is based more on my experiences as an american college student than anything.
> 
> finally, thanks to everyone for reading!! i look forwards to reading your comments!! 💚
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/playing_prince) | [cc](https://curiouscat.me/playing_prince)


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